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Red Road is an atmospheric little thriller made up of equal parts paranoia, loneliness and anxiety. The main characters are a man and a woman connected in some mysterious way. She knows him. He doesn’t seem to know her.
Jackie (Kate Dickie) works as a CCTV operator, monitoring the closed-circuit cameras that watch over her little corner of Glasgow. One day she spies a man she obviously recognizes, and not in a good way. He should be in prison. But he isn’t.
Almost as if against her own good judgment, Jackie begins to check up on this man, Clyde (Tony Curran). It seems to be a compulsion. She learns he lives in a block of flats on Red Road, a housing estate in a dodgy part of the city, and she slowly begins to insinuate herself into his life.
She finds a way into a party at his house. She arranges to be at a pub she knows he’s at. She can easily arrange to cross paths with him because of her job — the city’s cameras tell her where he is, almost at all times.
There’s a bit of a God-like element to Jackie’s job, sitting and watching the life of the city through the cameras mounted high above the streets. What Jackie wants from Clyde is left unknown until almost the end of the film, but the buildup in this cat-and-mouse game is fantastic. The tension in Red Road is carefully built, a slow, bleak, tightening of the screws. The eventual plot payoff is a bit of a letdown, but never mind.
Red Road bills itself as part of Lars Von Trier’s Advance Party concept — which means in part that the same group of characters will show up in films made by different directors. This film concerns mourning, a state of being reflected in the bleakness and abandonment that seeps into the story; the Red Road neighbourhood is all stray dogs and menace and seedy pubs. It’s even somewhat alienating that most of the characters speak with a heavy Glaswegian accent, a situation that calls for (and gets) subtitles.
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Red Road won a jury prize at Cannes in 2006 (along with several other awards in Europe), and director Andrea Arnold was given the Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer at this year’s BAFTAs.
(This film is rated 18-A)