Starring Dougray Scott, Alistair McKenzie and James Anthony Pearson
Hidden gems are, I’m told, a very hard thing to find at film festivals. So being my first time at any sort of film festival I wasn’t expecting to find any sort of gem at the Glasgow Film Festival last night. I didn’t.
I found a Scottish diamond.
New Town Killers, due for general release in June, premiered at the Glasgow Film Theatre last night and was shown to an audience attending by invite-only.
Shot over a period of 5 weeks and costing around £600k to make, Richard Jobson’s latest effort tells the story of the young, unemployed Sean McDonald (James Anthony Pearson) and his perilous attempts to get his sister Alice (Liz White) out of debt from the local Edinburgh mob.
Two private bankers (Scott and MacKenzie) offer Sean the chance to clear his sister’s debt on the condition that he can hide from them for 12 hours. Sean accepts the offer and soon realises it’s a tragic game of life and death that the bankers will stop at nothing to win.
Written before the credit crunch struck last year, the film’s plot is an extreme parable of the world financial crisis- evil bankers picking off the poor one-by-one with the incentive of cash, simply because they can.
Dougray Scott’s malevolent presence helps flow the film forward and in a style similar to Ledger’s Joker, Scott’s character is shown as unrestrained chaos.
James Anthony Pearson is great on screen and shows a whole other side of his talents with the some of the stunts he took part in.
The Filthy Tongues and the Flykillers (who scored the film) kept moving the film forward with it’s excellent soundtrack.
However props must go to Jobson and his technical crew. They have managed to create magic on a shoe-string budget and a film that is certain to become a cult classic of Scottish Cinema.
