The Vio­la­tors

Being a per­son who is trans­fix­ing­ly beau­ti­ful is both a bless­ing and a curse in nov­el­ist Helen Walsh’s frisky but super­fi­cial debut film fea­ture which, sad­ly, is unable to cap­i­talise on the blunt feroc­i­ty of its title. Shelly (played by Lau­ren McQueen) is intro­duced as an object of leery sex­u­al affec­tion in a series of open­ing shots pho­tographed from crotch height as she wan­ders around a crum­my games arcade in fig­ure-hug­ging blue jeans. She co-habits with two broth­ers, one younger, Jerome (Cal­lum King Chad­wick), and one old­er, Andy (Derek Barr), but both inef­fec­tu­al. Yet she remains mas­ter of this mod­est house­hold, ensur­ing the trio’s hard­scrab­ble exis­tence whichev­er way she can.

Dur­ing the first half-an-hour, Walsh builds up a sense of sub­tle intrigue in the way she intro­duces sup­ple­men­tary char­ac­ters and builds on the chron­ic, large­ly unseen back­sto­ry which land­ed the sib­lings in this sor­ry state of affairs. You’d have to be plain dim to not see that Stephen Lord’s greasy, rep­til­ian pawn­bro­ker Mikey was not a wrong’un from the first time you set eyes on him. Shelly wants a Zip­po lighter from his dis­play, and in what he claims is an act of unbid­den kind­ness, he hands it to her in return for a smile. But it’s clear in this windswept bad­land of dark alleys and sex­u­al preda­tors that he’ll soon want his pound of flesh.

Anoth­er impor­tant side play­er is Bro­gan Ellis’s Rachel, who crops up at ran­dom moments and becomes a friend to the down-at-heel Shelly. She is rich because she lives in a gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty, has an iPad and prac­tices fenc­ing in her spare time (Walsh’s delin­eation of class is almost com­i­cal­ly explic­it). Rachel’s pres­ence is as ran­dom as Mikey’s is con­ven­tion­al, and the man­ner in which she flits in and out of the plot at times bor­ders on the mag­i­cal real­ist. Until, that is, an unsat­is­fy­ing and con­trived expla­na­tion is deliv­ered in the film’s mea­gre final act.

Else­where much time is giv­en over to hand-held track­ing shots of Shelly walk­ing through estates and across unsight­ly scrub­land, nev­er once bump­ing into any­one who’s not one of the film’s key play­ers. Tobin Jones’ cin­e­matog­ra­phy doesn’t help mat­ters, tum­bling in and out of focus for rea­sons which seem to tran­scend the cos­met­ic. If this is a styl­is­tic choice, it’s a rather coun­ter­in­tu­itive one, as it actu­al­ly makes it hard­er to see what the actors are doing with their eyes. Maybe it’s intend­ed in the rough-and-tum­ble spir­it of the film’s set­ting. It’s a sol­id call­ing card film, but here’s hop­ing the next time around Walsh opts for tak­ing a few more risks.