Red Road: A Great Movie About Revenge and the Camera

Red Road is a fantastic movie that goes where no film has gone before. Cal it Dogme style, Indy cinema, whatever. The film will keep you glued in and nail biting until the end. It's about Jackie, a security monitor who watches closed circuit security cameras all over Glasgow, Scotland. But Jackie is inured to the spectacle even of what people do when they think nobody is looking. Jackie is painfully withdrawn from life and barely registers above a pulse. But something is about to reel her in...The sight of someone she knows in her all-seeing camera eye.

Red Road follows Jackie as she chases down the red haired man for real. Tony Curran as Clyde and Ann Dickie as Jackie top a superb cast. This is really an acting movie that knows the ropes. The director is Andrea Arnold, who has won an Academy Award for short subject films. Red Road got the jury prize in Cannes for 2006, swept the Scottish Film Awards, and garnered two BAFTA's for Curran and Dickie.

This is the first of three films with the same actors made by three different directors in the same place. But even one film like Red Road carries decades of resonances. Red Road incorporates hand held filmmaking with brilliantly written storytelling. If all film making could be this superb, we would all be in the theaters 7 days a week. Red Road has won film awards and cash prizes from Paris to Miami for its unpitying and intense storytelling about redemption and life on the edge.

Jackie's life is in the doldrums. That is, until she catches a glimpse of someone she recognizes. Literally, she sees red. A tall, red-haired man moving around in the cameras at the Red Road estates. Soon Jackie is tracing this man's movements everywhere. She obsessively tracks him all over Red Road with a joystick and dozens of video screens at her disposal. There is an erotic charge present but a whiff of Fatal Attraction that will leave viewers uneasy, as they should be.