Rollin': "Kills on Wheels"

The offbeat Hungarian feature Kills on Wheels earns high marks for representation: of its three main roles, two are occupied by performers in wheelchairs, one by a performer with cerebral palsy. Full marks, too, to writer-director Attila Till for refusing to attach any undue sentimentality to his characters' movements: Zolika (Zoltán Fenyvesi) and Barba Papa (Ádám Fekete) are bored, horny, resentful teenagers wasting away in a care home and desperately seeking an outlet for their yahoo energies, while Rupaszov (Szabolcs Thuróczy), the older man whose wing they fall under, turns out to be a pissheaded ex-fireman who supplements his disability benefits by carrying out hits around parts of Budapest even Béla Tarr might have trudged away from on the grounds of being too grim. It is both amusing and amazing that the film ended up becoming Hungary's official submission for last year's Foreign Language Film Oscar longlist (and no surprise that it eventually failed to place among the final nominees): the brakes are, in a very real sense, off.

What ensues is a wild and occasionally bumpy ride, intended at least in part to shake off any squeamishness or preconceptions concerning what might be "done" on screen with disabled characters or performers. If Till isn't quite the devil-may-care Lars von Trier of The Idiots - his film's a 15, not an 18 - he and his cast are still mischievous enough to make a bleakly comic setpiece out of the palsied Barba Papa's hitting the wrong button on a rec-centre vending machine, or the grumpy Rupaszov upending both his charges into a boating lake after he grows weary of their wittering. The assassination sequences, amusing in their own way, are premised on the idea polite society wouldn't think to suspect someone wheeling slowly away from the scene of a crime, because they surely wouldn't be up to such a physically demanding task, yet Till also takes care to include scenes that stress the energy and effort required of his protagonists to make an escape up a steep drive and through a locked gate. They can get away with a lot, these guys, but it isn't always plain sailing.

Certain aspects are less well thought-through. We're headed towards rehabilitation of a sort, but the narrative flow carrying everybody there can be a bit stop-start. Bridging scenes - like the boys' boozy after-hours tryst with three female physical therapists - sputter out before anything has been achieved or revealed; plot points (such as a feud between two rival siblings in the Budapest underworld, or Rupaszov's strained relationship with his ex) are scattered to the wind; while a framing device, suggesting the more murderous activity is but nihilist teen fantasy, doesn't really come off, and thereby undermines the compellingly skeezy reality Till cultivates elsewhere. You could argue that this lurching quality is deliberate, however: a show of solidarity with marginalised antiheroes who themselves don't move as we might anticipate. Either way, Till's mix-and-match soundtrack, leftfield characterisations (I liked Peter Lorre-alike Dusán Vitanovics' crimeboss, briefly seen shopping at Tesco) and unexpected tonal shifts imbue the film with a rude and not unenjoyable energy: in its own way, it's as jaggedly and defiantly punk as Ian Dury belting out "Spasticus Autisticus".

Kills on Wheels opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.