Dead Man's Shoes Details

Following his spaghetti western homage, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, British writer/director Shane Meadows turns his hand to horror. A grimy, naturalistic subversion of the slasher genre, this morally ambiguous shocker marries the style of 28 Days Later … with gallows humour of the blackest hue. In an uncomfortably matter-of-fact performance, co-writer Paddy Considine plays a tortured ex-army man who returns to the rural Midlands village of his youth to take revenge on a drugs gang who used and abused his younger, mentally challenged brother (Toby Kebbell). With many of the cast being non-actors and much of the dialogue improvised, there's a strong sense of realism that makes the violence portrayed so much more horrific. Initially, events are sweetened somewhat with acerbic wit and dark slapstick, but edgy laughs soon degenerate into grim brutality. It's an abrupt shift that unfortunately destroys the rising tension and turns a powerful, claustrophobic chiller into just another nasty exploitation flick.

Slow-paced drama, set in shabby suburbia and grubby rooms; there's a fault at its heart: the villains are so limited in their pleasures and aspirations that a more satisfying revenge would have been to allow them to continue with their squalid lives.