Director: Matt Johnson.
Starring: Matt Johnson, Owen Williams, Krista Madison.
Running Time: 83 Minutes.
Certificate: 15.
Synopsis: When two best friends team up to film a comedy about getting revenge on bullies, the exercise takes a devastating turn when one of them begins to think of it as more than a joke.
THE DIRTIES made its debut at Slamdance in the United States in early 2013 and won awards including the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at the same festival. Marking the directorial debut of Matt Johnson, who also stars and co-writes, the film is yet another one of those found-footage features which have been clogging up our cinemas screens since the break-out success of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT all of the way back in 1998.
The film revolves around two students, Matt (Matt Johnson) and Owen (Owen Williams), who start making a comedy revolving around a group of bullies at their high school. After being ridiculed in lessons, and beaten-up both physically and mentally, the duo take matters into their own hands by striving to make their film a reality, and plot to take their revenge.
Touching upon some pretty controversial subject matter, especially considering recent events in the US, the film offers a little more than some of the mediocre found-footage genre movies seen in cinemas recently. A very slow-burning first reel leads into a very engrossing second, the events playing out in a very foreboding manner towards an inevitable, shocking climax.
It’s an impressive debut for Johnson, whose skills as a director are mirrored as an actor too. His over-enthusiastic lead character is superbly acted, intense and unsettling, while Owen Williams provides a solid supporting lead, a polar opposite to Matt, though equally as impressive.
If you’re expecting a CHERNOBYL DIARIES, THE DEVIL’S INSIDE, or something equally as throw-away, then you’ll be very disappointed. It couldn’t be any further from those movies, and it would be easy to dismiss the concept of the film at first glance. THE DIRTIES has its faults, but it is a solid piece of original and indeed very relevant independent filmmaking, which is refreshing for the over-used, and surely had-its-day found-footage process of storytelling.
For a film that rarely shows any on-screen violence, save the intense final five minutes, you walk away with a sense that you’ve witnessed something deeply sinister, unsettling, tragic, daring and very, very scary. One of the best, and most important movies from a debut director we’ve seen in a long time.
[usr=4] THE DIRTIES is released in limited UK cinemas on Friday 6th June, 2014.
