Straightheads is not to be taken lightly. It’s dirty, horrific and upsetting, but it hits you in a way that, sometimes, cinema should.
Spliff-smoking Adam (Danny Dyer) has an easy job fitting CCTV into private residences. When, one evening, pert-arsed Alice (Gillian Anderson) arrives home to find him dozing on her deck and asks him to accompany her to a work do, he agrees – excited by the prospect of donning a tux, and the more obvious task of banging her senseless.
After a night of shagging in some trees, a moment’s distraction leads to an accident in a desolate wood that leaves both of them irreparably damaged in mind and body.
What follows is a psychotic display of emotional free falling. Neither Alice nor Adam can reconcile themselves with the events of that ill-fated night, try as they might to cover the scars and heal the wounds. It’s only when Alice discovers her father’s old army rifle in a drawer that she starts to see a new horizon.
Anderson adopts a highly commendable British accent in a gutsy performance that adds a little more lustre to the mid-career surge she’s been enjoying recently. Dyer’s woebegone cockney is a little predictable, but he redeems himself in the last 20 minutes.
It’s here that director Dan Reed goes all out to twist the knife, in a convulsive display of cinematic shock and gore that feels very close to personal abuse.
Straightheads is not to be taken lightly. It’s dirty, horrific and upsetting, but it hits you in a way that, sometimes, cinema should.
Gillian Anderson has put a run of small, quality films together.
You’ll wince, cringe and stick your fingers in your ears.
Might not buy it on DVD.
