Still *** (2014, Aidan Gillen, Jonathan Slinger, Elodie Yung) – Movie Review

Aidan Gillen stars as a North Central London photographer, knocked sideways by the death of his teenage son a year earlier. He gets involved in an increasingly horrifying feud with a teenage gang after a seemingly harmless collision with a young kid.

Writer-director Simon Blake‘s edgy, gritty and atmospheric urban realist film is as much a drama about a man disintegrating into despair and violence as a thriller, but luckily it works as both.

It’s a bit talky as a thriller, especially at the start, but the talk is good, and that does pay off when the thriller end of the story starts to focus and bite. Gillen is excellent, and the North Central London (N1) settings are atmospherically and imaginatively used to great advantage, in Andy Parsons’s standout cinematography.

A tough, but engrossing watch, it’s a fine, promising feature debut for Simon Blake, getting a lot of value from the £500,000 budget.

Gillen says: ‘I’m always attracted to bold, risk-taking scripts. In drama you can either pretend everything is OK, or you can show the world as it really is in the hope that it gets better.’ Still is the perfect example of this.

© Derek Winnert Classic Movie Review

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