In short: Red Road (2006)

Warning: there will be structural spoilers!

Jackie (Kate Dickie) is working as a CCTV operator in Glasgow. Apparently, she lives a lonely life, a fortnightly appointment (one really doesn’t want to call it a date) with a married man for some of the most loveless sex I can imagine looking like the only regular social encounter in her life.

Things change when she sees a man we will later learn is named Clyde (Tony Curran) on one of her monitors. Clyde must have been involved in some sort of crime against her – a rape would be the most obvious assumption – so Jackie at first seems panicked and desperate. However, she quickly begins to do more than panic, watching Clyde, following him in person, and getting close enough for him to touch, or for her to touch him.

Andrea Arnold’s Red Road is apparently part of some kind of filmic round-robin in which Arnold and two other directors used the same group of characters, but I don’t think one needs to know that or have seen the other films to be able to appreciate the film as what it is: a study of alienation and fear; a film about recovering from loss and guilt; and a brilliant revenge flick that doesn’t play by the rules of its genre most of the time.

Despite a colour scheme dominated by grey that suggests some sort of nearly documentary approach to filmmaking, Arnold is incredibly good at a lot of techniques very much unlike a documentary. There’s expressive editing that mirrors the mental state of Jackie, a camera that seems calm and distanced until it isn’t anymore, and little moments when the greyness and the drabness (that is as much outside of Jackie as it is inside of her) subtly clear a little. Further adding weight to the film is the strength and complexity of Dickie’s and Curran’s performances in the roles of two very difficult and very complex persons who are emotionally close in a way that is so ironic it is nearly perverse.

The film’s structure is admirable – as well as highly disciplined - including a revelation about the actual nature of the relation between Jackie and Clyde I wish scriptwriters trying to use plot twists would take a look at and learn from. Not, mind you, that it feels like a plot twist (which is more often than not a cheap surprise effect) – it is a revelation of truth that is also built to shake an audience’s assumptions.


As it goes with films quite this good, I don’t really think talking Red Road up – at least my way of doing it – does the film the justice it deserves. It’s a film to be watched with an open mind, with patience and with the greatest attention; to me, it felt very much like a revelation.