STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Gethin (Sion Daniel Young) is a young man, living in an economically deprived area of Wales, with insecure work on a zero hours contract. He is on the verge of following in the footsteps of his father and becoming homeless, and when his family spot a chance to jump up the housing ladder by asking him to move out, this moves closer to reality. Gethin finds himself drawn into a circle of friends who focus the burden of their lives on Muslims and immigrants, and is soon caught in a whirlwind of far right extremism that will have devastating consequences.
In the years following the surprise transatlantic success of Brexit and Trump, there appears to have been a massive increase in far right hate attacks, which is explored in this new short film from Joseph Bullman, the director of the recent, similarly styled Killed By My Debt, which I was pretty impressed with. It's set in a Welsh 'post industrial' town, where opportunity and hope are in very short supply. It's always in these environments where these destructive, right wing ideas manifest themselves, where it's easy to point the finger and say 'it's their fault', and Bullman does an impressive job of capturing this air of hopelessness.
It puts itself out to present a modern world unique from the recessionary world of the early 80s, with even black people now adopting ideas that they would have been the brunt of before, with even one of the main characters being such this way. As with KBMD, it has to squeeze a lot into an hour, and Gethin's transformation into a far right thug doesn't have as much time to develop as it should. It's also pretty small fry with it's build up to their attack, where all they do is attack a local Halal butchers, which is hardly going to get them that much attention.
It's been called a propaganda piece from the BBC by many, but what it's dramatizing is a very real daily reality in this uncertain new world, and while it all feels a little too simple and underdeveloped, it still leaves an unsettling, uncomfortable feeling under the skin, documenting a dark, depressing story that has repeated itself during the ages during times of hardship. ***
