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Review: Starred Up

★★★★☆

The audience is introduced to Eric Love, a young offender so prolifically violent he has been transferred (starred up) to an adult prison, as he is stripped naked, bent over and subjected to an anal cavity search. Starred Up establishes its agenda early on, to provide an unflinching, uncensored portrait of life inside. In a week that saw widespread public outrage at the debacle of justice secretary Chris Grayling’s ban on books and other small gifts being sent to prisoners, a film that asks searching questions about the model of rehabilitation offered by the UK’s prison system feels incredibly relevant.

The film is an intensely close scrutiny of the physical and the psychological experience of incarceration, a closeness that evokes the claustrophobia of confinement. On the one hand, Starred Up captures the corporeality of prisons, alluding to Foucault, who saw imprisonment as entailing ‘an additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself”. This acute awareness of the body is present in the regulation of food, used as means of concealing drugs and other contraband, in the repression of sexuality,and above all, in the violence that, if not physically enacted, is present below the surface in virtually every scene. Eric’s sense of self has been entirely determined by his physical strength, as an institutionalized serial offender, failed by the care system, his body provides him with his only agency or means of self-expression. Ex-Skins alumnus Jack O’Connell exudes physicality and volatility in a performance that sees him slashing a fellow inmate with a makeshift knife, taking on guards in riot gear with a broken table-leg, and, at his most feral, savaging a guard’s scrotum with his teeth. Starred Up is not for the faint-hearted, but neither is a prison sentence.

However, despite these Kubrick-esque orgies of ultraviolence, it is often the silences that have the greatest power to disturb. The film’s minimal soundtrack and the recurrent sequences of prisoners alone in their cells, quiet and listless, tangibly suggest the horror of isolation. If this emphasis on alienation and monotony is sometimes at the expense of plot, we must again refer to Starred Up’s agenda, as explicitly stated by the film’s director David McKenzie: ‘We want the audience to feel like they’re in jail’. In one of the most devastating moments in the entire film, Eric, left alone for the first time in his new cell, contorts his face as if to scream, before quietly placing his head in his hands, as if acknowledging the futility of crying out to nothingness. The film is always concerned to root the explosive, sinewy displays of violence in trauma and vulnerability; on his first day in jail, standing alone in the exercise yard, Eric is more lost schoolboy than hardened criminal.

This psychological validity is also present in the nuanced portraits of the prisoners’ relationships. There is little of Shawshank Redemption’s cheerful, Hollywood prison camaraderie. All the relationships are dark, twisted, and thwarted by the environment in which they develop. The emotional breakthroughs in the group therapy sessions, where the prisoners are briefly allowed to feel “part of something”, are constantly threatened by outbreaks of verbal and physical aggression. These meetings move from a thoughtful meditation on “how prison fucks you up” to crude “your mum” insults and racial slurs in a breathless acceleration of pace that characterizes Starred Up’s stop-start trajectory. The veracity of these portraits was informed by the film’s writer, Jonathan Asser’s, own experiences as a voluntary counselor at HMP Wandsworth. As the film progresses, the most important relationship is that of Eric and Neville, a nod to the prison-drama trope of paternal relationships that are readily formed in a male-dominated cast. Indeed, the Governor’s suggestion that Neville should act as a father-figure to Eric is playfully literalized in the revelation that Neville is actually his estranged biological father. An Oedipal struggle ensues, culminating in a fight scene as brutal as any other, before an ultimate reconciliation which is perhaps the only weak, sentimental note of the entire film, after Neville saves Eric from a dramatic murder attempt staged as a suicide by the prison’s sinister Deputy Governor.

The ending of the film may be unsatisfying in the traditional sense; we leave Eric as abruptly as we were introduced to him. Starred Up’s strength lies, however, not in any conventional formulation of plot or drama, but in its direct interrogation of the archaic social values of a penal system in which our protagonist is denied therapy on the grounds that he is ‘too violent’ and in which psychological trauma and disorder are exacerbated rather than addressed. Starred Up, by providing a compelling portrait of a world always obscured from the view of mainstream society,challenges the assumption that any human being, even those who have committed the most socially abhorrent crimes, is beyond help and rehabilitation.

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