UK Release: 22nd September 2006
Director Lodge H Kerrigan’s third feature purveys the sort of sparse, jittery, devastatingly powerful realism that characterises the work of the Dardennes brothers, a handful of British directors (Ken Loach, Paul Greengrass) and almost no-one in American cinema since the death of John Cassavetes.
Glass-eyed William Keane (Damian Lewis) may be deranged by anxiety about his missing child, simply deranged, or both at once. In between his manic prowls around New York City, he befriends single mother Lynn (Amy Ryan) and her little girl Kira (Abigail Breslin) who live in the same seedy welfare hotel as Keane.
The mood of angst is here enhanced by Kerrigan’s use of long takes, but it’s Lewis’s taut, entrancing performance — as good as Peter Greene’s portrait of a schizophrenic in Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven (1993) — that makes this nearly unmissable. Be warned, though: this is grindingly grim viewing.
****
UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 94mins
Review by Leslie Felperin
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