Ashley Walters has used the money and clout he gained from appearing in Netflix's Adolescence to produce and direct the kind of project he himself might have starred in some twenty-odd years ago upon leaving the So Solid Crew behind. Animol returns us to a site that has been a source of fascination for the British film and television industry since the days of Alan Clarke, when it was known as borstal; in dramatising the day-to-day workings of what is now referred to as a young offenders' institute, Walters and screenwriter Nick Love are basically updating Clarke's landmark Scum for a generation with neck tattoos, access to rec-yard drone drops and smartphones concealed about their person. (Probably best not to ask where about their person, nor how on earth they got them up there in the first place.) Tut Nyuot's Troy is that archetypal prison-movie figure, the essentially decent yet conflicted lad attempting to keep his head down and serve his time without getting into trouble. He lands an ally, a smoke partner and perhaps even something more besides in likable young Polish burglar Krystian (Vladyslav Baliuk), although we're led to question how much back-up the latter can provide, given that he spends his first days in chokey being beaten black and blue. For these two, it transpires, are merely fresh-faced pawns in a mounting turf war between the sleepy-eyed Dion (Sekou Diaby), who's asked Troy to smuggle in his phone as a means of controlling the (apparently voluminous) flow of drugs through the facility, and Troy's heavily tatted, livewire cellmate Mason (Ryan Dean), whose first act is to stage a one-man recreation of the Grange Hill credits in the refectory by kicking off over a stray breakfast sausage. We wonder (and worry) whether even Stephen Graham, strolling on in the comfiest of cardigans as the prison's emotional welfare officer Claypole, can really do much to open up a path forwards and a way out: for one thing, Graham has never seemed smaller on screen than he does here, obliged to share confined spaces with often rampaging hotheads 25 years his junior.
The backdrop would have seemed familiar even without the recent spoiler of Lionsgate's heavily marketed, more overtly commercial thriller Wasteman. But Walters and Love change up the dynamic occupying the foreground. Where Wasteman boiled down to a one-on-one cat-and-mouse game, Animol is two-versus-two, Walters seeking out young actors who, in squaring up to one another, describe subtly distinct ideas of troubled masculinity. The genre these characters are pitched into is less thriller than drama: an onscreen counter ticks off long afternoons of positioning or aimless dope-smoking, and Walters, who himself served seven months in one such facility upon turning twenty, clearly wants us to feel the days either skipping by or dragging their feet. That we willingly stay the course is down to these kids, who prove very nearly as assured and compelling as the seasoned pros in this cast: Nyuot's nervy, darting eyes at once convey a deep-seated vulnerability, a growing institutional intelligence, and an acute awareness of the myriad threats awaiting Troy beyond the frame. Graham is as dependable as ever as the one person on this wing who might actually be looking out for Troy's interests, but he also proves central to the film's most unexpected scene late on; Sharon Duncan-Brewster, as Troy's addict mother, gets a remarkable amount of backstory - and hurt - across in her semi-occasional appearances in the visiting room. When Love does finally reach for anything so contrived as plotting - plucking some clandestine video footage of Troy and Kristian in the lavs out of the air - it's not wholly convincing; there's also at least one stone-cold correctional cliche in the closing reels that Walters and his ensemble have to work hard to finesse in any way. Still, Animol is technically sharp, pursuing a look that goes distinctively against the generic grain. Rather than the washed-out frames that have become a feature of the starkly naturalistic institutional drama (including Wasteman), Walters and emergent cinematographer Tasha Back are forever alert to colour and texture, most prominently in one expressionistic dream sequence, but also in a very choice tableau of the facility's exterior at night - the inmates seen illuminated or silhouetted in their cells, like windows in an advent calendar - which strikes the eye as more cinematic yet. It's a more than respectable directorial debut - but Walters has served enough time in the British film industry to know it's your second film where a director really makes their bones: as in lock-up, only the strongest survive.
Animol is now playing in selected cinemas.
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