Coun­ty Lines

In the open­ing moments of Hen­ry Blake’s Coun­ty Lines, a woman out of shot explains the mean­ing of an ​‘accept­able loss’ to 14-year-old pro­tag­o­nist Tyler (Con­rad Khan). ​“You. You’re the accept­able loss.” She insists that he is replace­able to those he works for, and what fol­lows is a slow­burn explo­ration of the dan­gers this vul­ner­a­ble teen faces when he is groomed to trans­port drugs across the UK.

The sto­ry is told in two parts, and this offers a jar­ring before and after struc­ture regard­ing Tyler’s involve­ment with the mem­bers of a drug ring. He becomes an entire­ly dif­fer­ent per­son as he is influ­enced by the var­i­ous brands of mas­culin­i­ty that now sur­round him; going from doing his lit­tle sister’s hair in the morn­ing to scream­ing at his moth­er, ​“I am the man of this fuck­ing house, some­one has to look after this family.”

Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Sverre Sørdal often fix­es on Tyler’s face, while oth­er voic­es stay out of shot and out of reach, result­ing in a steady iso­lat­ed feel­ing. Soft colours of the deep­est blues and greens enhance Khan’s pow­er­house per­for­mance as he becomes fur­ther entrapped in a cycle of vio­lence. His turn is pow­ered by inter­nalised rage and fear. It bub­bles fran­ti­cal­ly behind his impen­e­tra­ble gaze, but occa­sion­al­ly there are explosions.

The first use of sound­track in Coun­ty Lines arrives 45 min­utes in, when Tyler seem­ing­ly realis­es the con­se­quences of his actions. The beats of James Pickering’s pound­ing score speed up to synch with his aggres­sion. How­ev­er, Blake does well not to leave view­ers entrapped in Tyler’s grim sit­u­a­tion, as we also explore the par­al­lel sto­ry of his strug­gling sin­gle mother.

With his fea­ture debut, Blake announces him­self as an assured new voice in British film, offer­ing a pow­er­ful warn­ing that, if the sys­tems in place aren’t going to help our kids, then there are ter­ri­ble peo­ple out there ready to step in.