In the recently completed Seattle International Film Festival, few movies were as tough-minded, or as artful, as “Red Road.” This film from Scotland is a dark journey: spiritually, visually, in every sense.
The central character is Jackie (Kate Dickie), a lonely widow who has endured a family tragedy in the past. Her job is to watch a bank of security cameras overlooking a tough area of Glasgow called Red Road.
One day she recognizes an ex-con named Clyde (Tony Curran) who had something to do with her past woes. She becomes obsessed with him, and begins creeping into his life in a mysterious way.
We’re not privy to what’s going on inside Jackie’s head, so we can only guess about these advances into this loutish man’s world. Also in Clyde’s orbit is a younger couple (Nathalie Press, from “My Summer of Love,” and Martin Compston), playing out their own unhappy drama.
If Jackie’s story were laid out in a conventional way, this might seem an unbelievable plot. But the difference is in the telling, and director-writer Andrea Arnold (who won an Oscar for her short film, “Wasp”) transforms this material into a hypnotic experience.
The film is all low-lit interiors and unreal colored lights, the soundtrack full of intoxicating songs. The actors, too, are exactly in tune with the material, and the little-known Kate Dickie gives a fearless performance.
It builds to a graphic sex scene that is shocking but in retrospect, inevitable. There’s a sinister quality to Jackie’s quest throughout this film, as though she is not merely seeking revenge against a bad man but trying to immolate herself, like a widow throwing herself on her own funeral pyre.
As strange and hard as the movie is, it’s a directing coup for Arnold. “Red Road” also has an unusual genesis: It springs from a concept by Danish film guru Lars von Trier, and is based on characters created by the prolific Danish screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen and the director Lone Scherfig (who together made a film in Scotland, the splendid “Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself”).
Jensen and Scherfig created the main characters, but they didn’t write a story. Arnold did. The plan is for two other directors to create two more films, still using the same characters, though with different people foregrounded.
We’ll see if this intriguing idea works out, but “Red Road” will be hard to top.
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