Red Road

Directed by Andrea Arnold, Red Road follows Kate Dickie’s Jackie, a CCTV operator in Scotland, as she begins pursuing the man responsible for a traumatic incident in her past. First-time filmmaker Arnold, working from her own screenplay, delivers an exceedingly (and sometimes excessively) deliberate character study that benefits rather substantially from Dickie’s captivating performance, as the actress delivers a stirring, sympathetic turn that elevates the proceedings on an impressively regular basis. It’s clear, as well, that Arnold does an effective job of establishing the decidedly seedy environment in which Jackie and the periphery characters reside, and although the writer/director occasionally pushes the slow-moving aesthetic to its limit, Red Road undoubtedly benefits from an ongoing emphasis on interludes and sequences of a palpably electrifying nature. The unexpectedly emotional final stretch ensures that the picture concludes on as memorable and compelling a note as one might’ve envisioned, with the end result is an erratic yet mostly rewarding debut that admittedly could (and should) have been trimmed down to 90 minutes.

*** out of ****