Trespass Against Us
Director: Adam Smith
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Brendan Gleeson, Rory Kinnear, Lindsey Marshal
Two-and-a-half stars
One accusation that cannot be levelled at Trespass Against Us, the feature-film debut from British director Adam Smith – best knownfor his Chemical Brothers music videos (they also provide the soundtrack here) and his work on TV shows including Doctor Who and Skins – is that it's predictable.
The film’s title seems begging to be plastered across the front of a straight-to-DVD B-movie horror flick, while the pre-release hype talked of heists gone wrong and gangs of outlaws, suggesting some kind of Brit-gangster flick in the style of Guy Ritchie.
In fact, this is an almost docu-drama-style, hyperreal study of the day-to-day lives of an extended family of travellers, living in the squalor of a home-made trailer park in England’s West Country. Admittedly, this not what most of us would class as “day-to-day” life. A typical day for the gang involves petty crime and walking round the encampment shirtless under England’s cold, grey skies, periodically burning their own, or someone else’s, possessions to pass the time.
Colby (Brendan Gleeson) is the patriarch of the Cutler clan, while his eldest son, the illiterate Chad (Michael Fassbender) dreams of a better life for his kids and hopes to break away from the clutches of his all-powerful dad.
Therein lies the struggle that frames the movie – but sadly it does not really engage. The main characters are neither unpleasant enough to wish for their downfall, nor sufficiently “loveable rogue” to cheer them on. We should be cheering for Chad in his efforts to break out of the criminal life he has been born into – but the truth is, we are never invested enough to really care.
Although he occasionally insists he wants to move on, Chad never really makes much effort to do so. He talks of a better life for his kids, yet his treatment of them amounts to neglect, bordering on abuse – regularly colluding with them to miss school, for example, so that he can educate them in the arts of driving stolen cars or hunting rabbits.
Both of the leads turn in decent performances – Gleeson’s Colby is a tyrant in a tracksuit, keeping his brood in a state of ignorance by insisting the world is flat and that education is a lie.
As for Fassbender, it is interesting to see him playing a weak, somewhat pathetic excuse for a human being rather than the towering heroes or magnetic super-villains we are used to – but that alone doesn’t quite cut it.
There’s a fly-on-the-wall feel to the whole affair, which in one sense is admirable as Smith clearly wanted to portray a true-to-life version of the story, which is based on a true story about an actual travelling community in The Cotswolds.
The flipside is that for the first 90 minutes, there is a sense that you could wander in and out of the theatre at will, without really missing a single important plot point. It is the cinema equivalent of flicking on coverage of a 24-hour broadcast from the Big Brother house.
When the final denouement does eventually come around, we are utterly indifferent.
cnewbould@thenational.ae
