Mackenzie: Starred Up (2013)

Referencing Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped has become something of a commonplace when it comes to prison films with any aspirations to profundity, but Starred Up is one of the few genre exercises that feels like a true descendent – a minute, painstaking and unbelievably visceral embodiment of the prison experience by way of a protagonist who, like Bresson’s Fontaine, is really more of an avatar than a character. From the moment Eric Love (Jack O’Connell) is “starred up” – moved from a juvenile facility to an adult facility, where he’s housed in the same wing as his father Neville (Ben Mendelsohn) – he seems convinced that the prison establishment isn’t merely looking to contain his body, but actually after his body itself, or at least his ability to control and co-ordinate his body. As a result, there’s not much in the way of introspection (or at least it's strongest when there's not), just the muscle memory and proprioceptive limits that Eric desperately tries to maintain by pre-emptively defending himself against convulsive onslaughts that nearly always have some element of rape or sexual abuse, and nearly always end with him being manhandled and bundled off to solitary confinement. Nor is there much in the way of narrative or dialogue - in some way, it resembles an episode from a gritty Granada or BBC One television series more than a fully-fledged film -  as Eric and his cellmates parry plosive chunks of sound that are so monosyllabic and thick with regional flourishes that they’re muscular rather than expository, bodily vibrations that feel more or less continuous with the punchups they inevitably precede. Too busy with staking claim to his own body to worry about escaping, Eric’s world contracts to anyone and everyone who comes too close to it, which creates a quite unique tone, meditative for long stretches but only ever the tiniest twitch away from ultra-violence as well, a process that his counsellor Oliver (Rupert Friend) tries to reverse by teaching him how to move from rage to a steady, calm contemplation of his rage. Still, by the end every encounter has become so traumatically embodied that it’s more like watching horror, or even torture porn – the end-point of an exponentially escalating aggression that’s so relentless that aggression itself starts to feel somewhat relative, forcing you to forget that any other way of interacting is really even possible. And perhaps that’s what finally allows Mackenzie to nail the weird ways aggression and abuse can domesticate intimacy among men in close confinement - in his vision, it’s only at the very threshold of the fight-or-flight response that the most tender and fragile homosocial communion can hide in plain sight, which is where his entire film feels poised as well, unspeakably vulnerable as it is unspeakably volatile.