Fish Tank movie review (2009) | Little White Lies

Fish Tank

10 Sep 2009 / Released: 11 Sep 2009

A young woman in a grey hooded sweatshirt, standing in a room with blue walls.
A young woman in a grey hooded sweatshirt, standing in a room with blue walls.
4

Anticipation.

Arnold’s previous, Red Road, proved she was a talent to watch.

4

Enjoyment.

Engrossing and brilliantly made British drama. You feel Arnold could never make a bad film.

4

In Retrospect.

Doesn’t quite place Arnold in the ‘masterpiece’ leagues, but certainly puts her in the top British filmmakers currently at work.

Lean, empa­thet­ic and dra­mat­i­cal­ly cred­i­ble por­trait of des­per­a­tion and desire on the cider-splashed streets of adolescence.

Con­sid­er for a moment the title of Andrea Arnold’s exhil­a­rat­ing sec­ond fea­ture, Fish Tank. It comes loaded with the infer­ence of restric­tion, of con­fine­ment, of repres­sion, of out­siders look­ing down on a less­er species. It would have been a legit­i­mate title for her pre­vi­ous film, Red Road, about a Glaswe­gian CCT work­er mon­i­tor­ing the actions of a man she once knew.

Yet dur­ing the first half hour of this new film – an elec­tric and volatile slice of Thames estu­ary real­ism – Arnold’s char­ac­ters appear to be expe­ri­enc­ing the con­trary. Their bound­aries are non-exis­tent; they thrive on spon­tane­ity; they do as they please; they live in the moment, for bet­ter and for worse.

The film is about Mia (Katie Jarvis), a fire­brand, hood­ie-sport­ing 15-year-old who, we’re ini­tial­ly led to believe, prefers to use her head to fight rather than to think with. She lives in a pokey domi­cile on a grim high-rise estate with pot­ty-mouthed younger sis­ter Tyler (Rebec­ca Grif­fiths) and love-strick­en moth­er Joanne (Kier­ston Ware­ing), but spends most of her time in a desert­ed flat near­by where she pri­vate­ly teach­es her­self to dance.

Cast­ing aside unnec­es­sary expo­si­tion, it’s a tes­ta­ment to Arnold’s undoubt­ed skill as a film­mak­er that she is able to give us an inti­mate feel for these char­ac­ters’ lives with­in the first three or four min­utes of film. The per­fect­ly cho­sen loca­tions, the salty lan­guage and the terse inter­ac­tions between char­ac­ters all drip with detail and texture.

The equi­lib­ri­um is tipped when strap­ping secu­ri­ty guard Con­nor (Michael Fass­ben­der) – the mys­te­ri­ous new love inter­est of Mia’s moth­er – arrives on the scene. This is where the title comes in, as the film is about the close co-habi­ta­tion of the fam­i­ly under this new set-up, and per­haps more impor­tant­ly, how the prox­im­i­ty turns the place into a hotbed of psy­cho­log­i­cal unrest.

Any more detail about what actu­al­ly occurs in the film would only impair its remark­able suc­ces­sion of gen­uine­ly dis­turb­ing and sur­pris­ing devel­op­ments, but it most­ly con­cerns Conner’s seem­ing­ly benign efforts to draw Mia from her shell.

As was already hint­ed-at in Red Road, Arnold demon­strates an almost Hitch­cock­ian abil­i­ty to visu­alise encroach­ing dan­ger and coiled emo­tion on screen. It’s this that push­es Fish Tank into an alto­geth­er high­er brack­et of film­mak­ing. Some scenes in the film are like­ly to be the most ago­nis­ing­ly tense you’ll see in the cin­e­ma this year, as Arnold, with the aid of DP Rob­bie Ryan, doesn’t so much film the action as assid­u­ous­ly tease out sit­u­a­tions with the camera.

Cred­it should also go to her actors, who give Arnold their all. Fass­ben­der has nev­er been bet­ter. New­com­er Jarvis effort­less­ly car­ries the film.

But while Arnold’s tech­nique is mus­cu­lar for sure, her writ­ing still needs some fine-tun­ing. A sub­plot involv­ing a sort-of love affair with Har­ry Treadaway’s grimy trav­eller feels extra­ne­ous, and Mia’s strange desire to free his chained up horse is too pro­nounced a visu­al metaphor to sit next to the queasi­ly curt real­ism of the film’s remain­der. But these are eas­i­ly for­giv­en flaws in what is a lean, empa­thet­ic and dra­mat­i­cal­ly cred­i­ble por­trait of des­per­a­tion and desire on the cider-splashed streets of adolescence.

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