Critics reviews

The film refuses its own quaintly nightmarish potential, settling for a phony acid-realism. Sickly colors and lengthy stretches of silence lightly urbanize the rampant suffering, though there’s too little class context for this to have any significance. The movie’s true boldness is in its length, which is hysterically unnecessary for such a portable premise.

Red Road's steady voyeurism builds to a provocative climax and cleansing denouement in which the answers to all our questions become apparent.

Directed and co-written by British first-timer Andrea Arnold, "Red Road" is the first in a Dogme-styled trilogy called "Advance Party."... With assured performers, handheld cameras and natural lighting -- the ABCs of the Dogme method -- Arnold has given this ambitious undertaking a provocative start.

As Arnold gets into the grit of her characters, leading Jackie toward the explosion she and we crave and then beyond, she drops the voyeurism theme almost entirely, a bait-and-switch that doesn't cripple "Red Road" so much as snip off its richest and eeriest thread. The movie trades the paranoia of modern omni-cam culture for a tighter, more personal drama, and while it sticks with you, you feel the missed opportunity like a phantom leg.

Red Road has a mesmerizing, grainy look, and its premise and its plot present a lot of possibilities. But there appears to be an underlying struggle between the movie Arnold wanted to make—an elliptical study of obsession and voyeurism—and the necessary backstory that Jensen and Scherfig provide.

“Red Road” isn’t as assured as the Dardenne Brothers‘ “The Son,” but Arnold increases its stalker suspense while keeping an eye on moral consequences, intra-character tension, and the social determinism of its surroundings.

The emotional tour de force by its lead character Jackie, played by Kate Dickie, goes a long way to maintain the intensity of the film. Nevertheless, and despite great performances by an assortment of renegade working-class Glaswegians, the somewhat contrived revenge plot doesn’t work half as effectively as the film does in its portrayal of a particular place, namely Red Road.

By limiting our entry into Jackie’s headspace, Red Road feels disingenuously committed to sympathetically portraying her situation, partly using her circumstances as pretense for narrative suspense—suspense which, regrettably, leads to tedious audience guessing games regarding Clay’s crime (rape? Hit-and-run? Murder?) and a cathartic revenge plot by Jackie that verges on the preposterous.

Red Road carries with it a distinct whiff of patronising exploitation in its presentation of a haplessly lumpen, undereducated, inarticulate underclass, here presented in an uniformly stygian set of flats, pubs and litter-strewn streets... [and] Just as such details smack of scriptwriting contrivance, Red Road falls down in its general tackling of major themes.

Red Road is one of those films that demands and rewards close attention. The performances are wholly convincing and the unremittingly pessimistic view of life in Britain's neglected inner-city areas is bracingly honest. There are flaws... but this is an extraordinarily mature and thoughtful film.

Arnold's opening episode of the trilogy is so powerfully self-enclosed that with all respect to the other two directors, you can't help feeling she's pretty much rendered the rest of the project redundant. I don't feel we need to know what Jackie or Clyde or the man with the dog does next: what Andrea Arnold does next is the really intriguing question.

Writer/director Andrea Arnold keeps us hooked, eerie surveillance footage scored by an ambient soundtrack of clangs, rumbles and whistles promising dark twists that Red Road never quite delivers on (an awkward payoff is particularly disappointing).