Critics reviews

Not unlike the rest of Arnold’s work, Fish Tank mutates into something far weightier than a window into the lives of the underprivileged. It becomes an ode to all the children who fleetingly experience moments of blissful exuberance.

Andrea Arnold’s gritty story of a troubled, headstrong teenager and wannabe dancer who carries on an affair with her mom’s scuzzy but likable boyfriend (played by one Michael Fassbender) demonstrated the director’s deft handling of messy human relations, as well as the power of her loose, improvisatory style.

I could have chosen the completely different — but not all that unsimilar, if you think about it — Dogtooth, which came out the same year, but I like Fish Tank a little bit better, partly because of the dancing scenes to Bobby Womack’s cover of “California Dreamin’” (though I prefer José Feliciano’s cover) and Nas.

Nobody would ever mistake Arnold for a lazy director, not with her constant shifting of visual strategies—moving from inhabiting Mia's point of view to distanced, voyeuristic shots of her dancing alone—or her pile-up of deliberate metaphors (as when our bridling heroine espies a chained white horse in her flat's immediate vicinity), but there's something about Fish Tank that feels too carefully diagrammed.

We should be outraged. We're not.... Arnold is so honest with her story and characters, and the actors so adept at revealing subtle, conflicted nuances, that it unfolds like it had to happen. It would be more insulting to Mia had Arnold made her spitfire little heroine the cardboard cutout victim — sagging in the aftermath of statutory rape. Instead, she allows this girl to have a serious crush, to feel lust, to yearn for one bright spot in her otherwise dreary life.

Fish Tank’s authenticity may owe much to Arnold’s own experiences, but it undoubtedly stems almost as much from her finding Katie Jarvis... Just as Loach’s Kes depended totally on the tough vulnerability of the young David Bradley as Billy, so Jarvis brings to Mia a complete believability.

Arnold avoids obvious judgements, obvious explanations. [Fish Tank] is an intimate drama of grey areas and all the better and more thoughtful – and thought-provoking – for it.

Fish Tank isn't an easy watch – it's like two hours of ache – but there are rich rewards to be had in the many ways Arnold and her terrific team rend us to and fro.

In a film so tightly focused, all depends on Katie Jarvis' performance... She is a powerful acting presence, flawlessly convincing here. And Arnold... deserves comparison with a British master director like Ken Loach.

Fish Tank, which is pitilessly plausible, [is] also the anti-Thirteen, painting a complex, and deeply sad, picture of the fraught intersection between teenage and adult desire and the ways in which mothers fail their daughters.

The scope of the movie is completely Mia's experience; the camera moves with her in almost every shot... FISH TANK fits well in the British tradition of social realism movies, but banishes any sentimentality in exchange for allowing its characters to respond fully to their ever-worsening circumstances. Still, in all that goes wrong, Arnold provides Mia, and thereby the audience, small moments of rest, beauty, and limited transcendence.

“Fish Tank” is not drawn from the case files, and does not solicit pity. Rather, thanks to Ms. Arnold’s fine-grained realism and the astonishing performance of Katie Jarvis... it is a diamond-hard reflection on the peril and progress of a fragile soul in a bad situation.