Wasteman Review
Set inside a UK prison, newcomer Cal McMau uses his lethal and gripping cinematic debut to face audiences with the irrefutable fact that our prison system is failing. The BAFTA-nominated screenplay is commanded by David Jonsson as Taylor (The Long Walk) and Tom Blyth as Dee (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), who become short-fused cellmates during Taylor’s final week in prison. David Jonsson and Tom Blyth are two of the most exciting names in film right now, and Cal McMau’s Wasteman proves that they are just getting started.
The brutal tone of Wasteman is immediately established when ward kingpins Paul and Gaz (the clean-cut and ruthless Alex Hassell and Corin Silva) smash a television over another inmate’s head during a search for drugs. The intensity is amplified by cinematographer Lorenzo Levrini’s use of phone screens to record the violence — a striking, recurrent visual motif which isolates and submerges audiences and prisoners further into the depravity of their settings and incrimination. A plethora of sequences shot through floor grates paired with overhead shots of the prison courtyard tactically position audiences as voyeurs, submissive in the robotic and unforgiving surveillance of our film’s leads.
Jonsson plays Taylor, a reserved smack-head and resident ward hairdresser, who is offered an early release after thirteen years of imprisonment due to overcrowding. Taylor’s intentions of a quiet final week plummet at the arrival of a heavily tatted, bloodied and bruised Blyth as Dee. You hear him before you see him, and Dee arrives with a tuckshop’s worth of sweets and smack, a killer kimono and a challenge to the previously undisputed hierarchy of the ward. Jonsson and Blyth’s parallel performances are transformative. Jonsson’s physicality as Taylor is painfully self-effacing; his hunched shoulders, hurried gait and doe-eyed glances masterfully capture our sympathy whilst heightening the rampant intimidation of Blyth’s puffed-out chest and domineering stature.
Wasteman pulsates — energy, anxiety, rage, blood and sweat. A rip-roaring bass carries us from cell to cell. Explicit violence and claustrophobic fight sequences with bloodied riot shields, kitchen knives and tuna cans as weapons of choice, McMau does not shy away from the brutality orchestrated by both officer and inmate. Inmates thrash down and demand one another to just “take it, take the fucking beating”, and McMau forces audiences to wonder, could you?
Gritty cinema with a rapid pulse. There is no room for air in the prison-based thriller debut from Cal McMau. Volatile, bloody and ruthless. A razor-sharp insight into a failing and corrupt system. Tom Blyth & David Jonsson like we’ve never seen them before.
★★★★
In UK Cinemas February 20th / Tom Blyth, David Jonsson, Alex Hassell, Corin Silva / Dir. Cal McMau / Lionsgate / 18
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