London To Brighton

This film won the British Independent Film Award for Best Achievement in Production in 2006, the Golden Hitchcock Award at the Dinard British Film Festival for Paul Williams (2006), the director, the New Director’s Award at the Edinbugh Film Festival 2006, the Evening Standard British Film Awards for most promising newcomer for Paul Williams in 2007, the Festival Prize for best feature film at the Foyle Film Festival in 2006, the Raindance Film Festival Juy Prize for UK Feature for Paul Williams in 2006 and was nominated for six other awards.

This isn’t surprising because the film displays an uncompromising view of the seedy, sordid, salacious underbelly of London, with its vicious disregard for humanity and this vision of life that has a visceral effect on the viewer. There is a grim sense of inevitability about the film: people’s lives are hard and hopeless and they grift as best they can to get by. The gloom extends to the locations too, from the grey and empty streets of London to the cold and desolate Brighton beach.

And yet despite the despair and the lengths that street worker Kelly (played quite brilliantly by Lorraine Stanley) has to go to to simply survive, she discovers a streak of maternal compassion and morality when she takes the lost 12 year-old Joanne (a stunning debut by Georgia Groome) under her wing as the girls go on the run from some very bad men. The cast is uniformly excellent but particularly the two female leads and the vicious thug Derek who is played with such clinical and chilling effiiciency by Johnny Harris.

This truly impressive first feature film, announces a major talent in Paul Williams, both as director and writer. His dialogue is snappy, sharp and unsentimental and adds to the authenticity of the film. It is a violent movie yet much of the violence is either implied or takes place out of shot and the film is much more powerful for it. The camerawork is particularly effective. On a tight budget, Christopher Ross achieves a brilliant mix of widescreen with handheld close up shots, and a kind of sordidness which seems inherent in the environment. The sound is good and the occasional music heightens the tension. It packs a considerable punch, and ileaves you feeling as if you’ve been on a particularly scary rollercoaster ride.