Critics reviews

Viewed as a docudrama about the challenge of socializing violent convicts, Starred Up succeeds brilliantly, delineating the issue without resorting to platitudes or sentimentality. Indeed the protagonist resists our sympathy for nearly the entire first half.

This evocative expression of the jail atmosphere is Starred Up's greatest virtue, its palpable world-building sustaining itself even in the absence of any apparent narrative direction (for a while, to the extent that the film has any outline, it's just one rocky spasm of anger).

Starred Up may be a prison movie, but it feels more as if it's set in a submarine. Throughout, we see nothing of the outside world, and barely—until the end at least, when the film momentarily "surfaces"—any significant glimmer of daylight. It's a remarkably claustrophobic film—as a prison drama ought to be.

If Starred Up traverses well-worn territory, it never feels the least bit derivative. Each familiar prison movie trope it trots out—shower attacks, beating someone on the first day, an evil warden—is validated by the conviction of Jonathan Asser's script (Asser once worked as a therapist in a London jail). It's all so suffocatingly immersive that every concession to cliché feels like a merciful gasp of fresh air.

The truth is that ascribing Starred Up's success to "palatability" would be a disservice to the movie, which, in many ways, is both more radically unsentimental and more idealistic than Mackenzie's earlier work.

Gradually, in a way that may be relevant to our current moment, and our understanding of rebels at home and abroad, the film shows how flawed, passionate individuals interact with an equally and differently flawed, basically omnipotent authority... [But] the film loses its battle with contrivance, pitting family love against pantomime villainy in order to arrange a cross-cut rescue sequence with family redemption on the line.

Because of Starred Up's murky sound and criminal argot, U.S. viewers may miss some of these details, though Mackenzie's tense, fluent storytelling—more indebted to Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped than Alan Clarke's Scum, the obvious antecedent—is emphatically visual.

O'Connell's electrifying physicality makes this an exciting and unpredictable portrait of prison life. But there can be no argument that incarceration is in any way glorified here. Starred Up is a bruising, unsentimental work that brilliantly contextualises the grim reality facing scores of young criminals entering prison today. Unlike the suffocating prison walls in which the drama unfolds, however, this is a film you'll want to revisit.

...The question of which of these conflicting influences will prevail is at the heart of Mackenzie's film, and a gut-churning dread consequently hangs over every scene, as Eric learns the merits of counting to ten while jealousies, misunderstandings and petty agendas run rife around him.

...Starred Up is no mere depiction but a jolting immersion in the claustrophobic mix of violence and vulnerability that is prison life, and it's powered by Jack O'Connell's riveting performance as violent criminal Eric Love. It is also, in this unlikeliest of settings, an intensely charged father-and-son story.

All of Mackenzie's characters in Young Adam and Asylum andMister Foe are prisoners in one way or another, and his latest is a family drama and a love story dressed in penitentiary grays, a tale about people slamming into each other and into their own limitations, a chain of alliances brutally damaged and tentatively mended. Each punch is felt deeply.

Tough, violent and profane, the movie is also sensitive to the nuances of emotion underneath the macho belligerence, and honest about what its characters must do to survive.