LUCIDMEDIA

Down Terrace can be a tough movie to pin down. At times it’s a hilariously subtle character comedy, but it’s never more than a few minutes away from being a violent crime thriller or bittersweet drama. This schizophrenic tone makes first time director Ben Wheatley’s film quite unpredictable for a story that on paper should be a standard crime melodrama. While Wheatley doesn’t shy away from the bloody theatrics that makes that genre so thrilling, he isn’t telling a story about Mexican drug lords sleeping on mountains of cocaine. His films is about the domestic life of a family of British drug dealers and the attention to detail as well as the awkward comedy that defines their boring lives makes the project unique in the genre.

The film opens with a father and son being released from a brief stay in prison (played by the director’s long time friends and real father/son team Robert and Robin Hill). They return to their middle class home with plans to uncover who sent them to jail. A parade of weird local grotesques walk through their doors including a pathetic club owner, an over-the-hill toughie, and a hitman with a toddler, all possible suspects. The son’s girlfriend then shows up pregnant, further complicating things since the family is still run as if he is still an adolescent. Bickering and casual drug use seem to make up their days until suspicions get the better of every body and the bloody last act devolves into a series of double crosses and murders.

If there’s a problem with the movie it’s the violent finale. Though inevitable, it feels like Wheatley and his co-writer/editor Robin Hill simply killed off all of their characters in favor of having to come up with a conclusion for their story. The violence is quite shocking at first, but quickly becomes routine once every character gets a shot at a death scene. Admittedly it does clash with the character comedy created up until that point in an interesting way, but there’s a shame more of the comedy wasn’t worked into the last 20 minutes. Wheatley and Hill have created an incredibly entertaining, relatable, and pathetic collection of characters. These aren’t idealized crime lords, but local thugs trying to raise families and have a semblance of normal life when they aren’t kicking the shit out of each other. Wheatley genuinely makes us care about the characters and watching them bicker over their pathetic lives is hilarious and infinitely more entertaining than anything that happens once the violence comes into play.

Shot in a raw documentary style, the Down Terrace was put together over a ridiculous 8-day shooting schedule. The fact that they ended up with anything watchable let alone something as funny and intriguing as this is quite an achievement. The British crime movie has been in a bit of a rut as of late and this odd concoction of influences ranging from Ken Loach to The Sopranos feels like a breath of fresh air. It too low key of a movie to change the world or even have much of an impact on the genre, but it is a pleasant surprise that establishes Ben Wheatley as a filmmaker of incredible promise. Who would have guessed that watching middle aged burnouts threaten each other over tea and biscuits could be so riveting?