Sweet and deadly

andy-blog3.jpgMullighan has already written about Sugarhouse, having seen it before I arrived, but I had to rave about it myself. Usually my heart sinks when phrases like UK, gangster and council estate come tagged to a movie, so I wasn’t expecting to like this film quite as much as I did. But everything about it belies what you usually get with those labels.

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What I love about it is that no one in it is as clear cut as they first appear. Who you think they are and what you think they want keeps being redrawn again and again, so that by the end it’s so much more than the random collision of a businessman, a crackhead and a gangster.

It comes with three stunning central performances by Steven Mackintosh, Ashley Walters and Andy Serkis, lovely cinematography and a cracker of a script by Dominic Leyton.

Normally when you realise a film is adapted from a stage play, it’s a bad thing, but in this case everything that makes good theatre so rewarding is what works here: the intensity of a real-time clash of characters and the ruthless peeling back of layer after layer till something like truth is exposed.

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