Contrary to popular opinion, it’s easy to addict oneself to gritty realist cinema. There’s something moreish about the feeling of slackening one’s mind into a putty-like receptacle, ready to be loaded full of outrage, shock, pity and righteous indignation. And if that doesn’t hook you, at the end of the movie you’re suffused with the warm fuzzy feeling that you earned by relating to people in worlds entirely alien to your own.

On the face of it, Lion’s Den – with its tagline ‘Mother Behind Bars’– looks set to satiate even the staunchest fan of ‘hard-hitting’ film. Julia – an eye-catching, affluent 20-something – is imprisoned for committing a murder of which she has no memory (legal injustice always gets the juices flowing). Being pregnant with the dead man’s child (abandoned, vulnerable mother) she is incarcerated in an all-female ward where inmates can raise their children (the clincher: innocent, criminalised babies).

Director Pablo Trapero has taken this plot – purpose-made, it would seem, for soliciting empathy – and done the unthinkable. He has refused to disguise the impossibility of relating to his subjects. Read more »

Northwest Vision and Media – which funded Salvage (2009) along with two other micro-budget feature films, both premiered in 2008 – has asked me to keep a secret. As budget film benefactors are the undisputed angels of the industry, I’ve decided to play nice and not broadcast the mystery of the shipping container whose contents rampage their way through Salvage’s 180 blood-spattered minutes.

Jodie (Linzey Cocker) plays the Dad-doting teen sent to spend Christmas with her career-bent mother (Neve McIntosh) who is found – true to form – bonking a stranger with the door open. Thus, when the horrors-of-which-we-may-not-speak break out of a shipping container washed up on a nearby beach to terrorise the streets of the cul-de-sac, Mum and her friendly fuck are left peeping out at the house across the road, where Jodie has fled in sulky rebellion.

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