Red Road

Grade: A

Winner of several major awards, including a jury prize at Cannes, this debut feature from Scottish director Andrea Arnold is a chilling, surprising and sophisticated tale of grief and revenge. In Glasgow - a city one can only hope is not as bleak and depressing as it looks in this film - an emotionally distant woman named Jackie works in a dark room with a wall's worth of TV monitors, surveying live camera footage for occasional crimes that she's supposed to report to the powers that be.

Jackie is clearly in a state of mourning, though we don't find out why until the end of the film. We do know, however, that she sees a man on camera who's been released early from prison, and this provokes Jackie to undertake a mission so strange and humiliating that we start to think she's bonkers until ... you guessed it ... we discover the reason why she's grieving in the first place. Kate Dickie is brilliant as the ubermelancholy Jackie. Tony Curran makes for a creepy-but-charming mystery man, and the wonderful Nathalie Press from My Summer of Love makes the most of her limited screen time.

NOTE: If you rent the DVD be sure to turn on the English subtitles because the Scottish brogue is often incomprehensible.