Review of Treacle Jr. (2010) by Ben D — 31 Jan 2013

Jamie Thraves came to my attention with his 2000 feature film debut The Low Down, a fascinating slice of life piece set in London. He seemed to go very quiet until 2009's misjudged American debut, Cry of the Owl (despite starring two people I like very much indeed, Julia Stiles and Paddy Considine). I wondered, watching Treacle Jr, whether the bad experience of Cry of the Owl, sent him back to his cinematic roots, for what we have here is another slice of London life, natural in feel, and with Aidan Gillen again.

I've always wondered why Aidan Gillen isn't a bigger star - he's a phenomenal actor - and here he plays Aidan, a man with obvious emotional problems and learning difficulties, who befriends a man, Tom (played by Tom Fisher), who has abandonded his family to live homeless. The two strike up an odd-couple friendship (despite Tom attempting to flee repeatedly) and Tom is introduced to Linda, Aiden's girlfriend, played by Rhian Steele - and she is a nasty piece of work, abusive to Aiden (she hits him in a shocking moment, and later seems to attempt to rape him) but seems lost too. As these three souls connect and disconnect, Thraves' camera simply observes.

Treacle Jr is not initially an easy film to love: we wonder why a man seems to walk out on a happy life. Aidan seems to deliberately irritate and antogonise. And yet, as these two become friends, the film becomes increasingly charming, and we care about its characters, until by the end it has become something genuinely moving.

Defiantly low-key, this is the kind of British cinema we should be celebrating. It shows that with the simplest of elements you can make a film that can speak to multitudes, and be more memorable than any movie wtih a budget of millions. That Thraves funded this off his own back (risking his own home) shows how much he believed in it: do him a favour and try and see it. You won't regret it. This is British film-making of a high order. Wonderful.