Down Terrace

From 2006 on, Ben Wheatley co-wrote and directed British TV series each year with Robin Hill, who also acted in them. In 2009, the pair completed their first feature, Down Terrace. Inevitably, it was a crime caper; no other genre seems to get green-lighted for low-budget British film projects.

The long struggling life of a wannabee movie-maker can be guessed from Hill's listed credits. Together with the young Hurst brothers, he'd co-written/produced and acted in a very low-budget (£4,000) Betacam thriller in 1996 about a bunch of druggie squatters in Brighton, Project Assassin. His father, Robert Hill, helped out by playing a menacing government mind controller. Their effort never saw the light of a UK projector, but it was bought, transferred to film and distributed by a German producer in the European market.

With Down Terrace, one senses that Hill and Wheatley initially conceived a new TV six-parter, a noir sitcom about a crime family coping with treachery in a nondescript suburb of Brighton. Clearly inspired by the idea of a working-class British gang a la Sopranos, they created a group of mentally-disturbed criminals with generation gaps and bizarre spouses. It was filmed in the Hill family's own house in Brighton; Mr Hill Sr took the role of the gang's unctuous ex-hippie folk-singing father figure. Mr Hill Jr played his neurotic son, and his team probably realised they had the makings of an above-average crime movie/sitcom/family drama. In any case, the volume of "fucking" in the dialogue and the brutally comic murders in the plot would have confined the series to a late-night slot on a minor British TV channel.

The movie version, if that's what it is, has an episodic style suited to TV, with quick cuts to black between scenes. Each day is announced with captions, and the movie employs hand-held cameras and close-ups to catch the bitter family banter and characters' repressed hatreds and fears. As in Mike Leigh films, the claustrophobic atmosphere of a real, scruffy tenement house's rooms focuses attention dramatically on the actors, whose performances are as convincingly "natural" as those in a Leigh ensemble (and that of the recent Australian crime family saga, Animal Kingdom).

The family house is an integral part of the story, which stays in the living room and front door corridor while it establishes the individual characters: harassed mother, pregnant girlfriend and middle-aged gang mates greeting the father (late 50s) and his son on their return home after a courtroom acquittal. Someone shopped them, they believe, and their London boss is concerned. Half-way through, the film ventures outside the house, into the surrounding Downs countryside, then back in the house to the upstairs toilet and out to the small back garden.

Good editing and camera-work heighten the tension, twisting it with laugh-out-loud murders, providing frequent musical relief through folk songs' fake poignancy. They echo the storyline that this family depends on dreams and lies, and will destroy itself with sadness. That's good material for a finely-designed debut feature that deserves a lot of recognition and awards.

[The historic southern English seaside resort city gained fresh notoriety for its status as a haven for London's criminals (especially Cockneys) in the mid 1940s from the success of Brighton Rock, a novel by Graham Greene, who re-wrote it for the stage and cinema, with young Richard Attenborough in the lead role. (Rowan Jaffe's 2010 remake, starring Sam Riley, was to be released in February 2011.)]