Pro­tein review – nasty, fun­ny, soulful

There are worse films to be obsessed with than Shane Mead­ows‘ Dead Man’s Shoes, and that film’s blood-flecked paw prints are all over writer/​director Tony Burke’s wit­ty, Welsh revenge yarn, Pro­tein. The film cheek­i­ly adopts its title from the sup­posed nutri­tion­al qual­i­ties of human flesh among the more des­per­ate ech­e­lons of the body build­ing com­mu­ni­ty, as our hood­ed, mono­syl­lab­ic pro­tag­o­nist, Sion (Craig Rus­sell), is in town to take out some tin­pot trash and then feast on their fresh­ly carved entrails.

On the side­lines is kind­ly gym work­er Kat­ri­na (Kezia Bur­rows) who attempts to befriend the shell-shocked Sion, and while he very much remains a closed book emo­tion­al­ly, he does offer her a secret assist by butcher­ing a chau­vin­ist local lout who’s giv­ing her grief. In fact, the horror/​slasher ele­ment of the film is per­haps the least inter­est­ing thing about it, as Burke builds up an ensem­ble of char­ac­ters who are all more than mere func­tion­al bit-play­ers serv­ing a hack­neyed plot.

For exam­ple, two drug-deal­ing goons who work for a smarmy local king­pin are secret lovers who have been forced to con­ceal their rela­tion­ship due to the air of unre­con­struct­ed machis­mo that per­vades their grub­by lit­tle com­mu­ni­ty. Sim­i­lar­ly, the two cops inves­ti­gat­ing this rash of dis­ap­pear­ances come freight­ed with their own trau­mas, and an ini­tial­ly frosty rela­tion­ship even­tu­al­ly thaws into some­thing that’s rather tough­ing for a film that, in the main, focus­es on vio­lence, big­otry, exploita­tion, humil­i­a­tion and which house­hold tools are best for admin­is­ter­ing pain to your fel­low man.

The link to Dead Man’s Shoes doesn’t begin and end with its angu­lar lon­er with zero moral scru­ples when it comes to off­ing his tar­gets. Burke injects a much-need­ed hit of parochial humour into pro­ceed­ings, exem­pli­fied by Steve Meo’s hilar­i­ous, hap­less Kevin, a wannabe wide­boy who loves noth­ing more than to play dress-up Travis Bick­le in his bed­room and have yelled argu­ments with his (always off-cam­era) mother.

There’re no wheels being rein­vent­ed here in terms of tone or nar­ra­tive, but it is a very sol­id genre runaround that is ele­vat­ed by its occa­sion­al and wel­come laps­es into soul­ful intro­ver­sion. It’s high­ly sat­is­fy­ing to see a film­mak­er tran­si­tion from a career mak­ing music videos and shorts to a work which expends time and effort to flesh-out all of its char­ac­ters – even if that flesh might be even­tu­al­ly eat­en by its can­ni­bal­is­ti­cal­ly-inclined antihero.