An outstanding piece of work, Henry Blake’s debut feature finally arrives on screens this week following glowing reviews of the festival circuit. Conrad Khan shines in a debut lead role about a fourteen year old boy caught up in a criminal network, the ‘county lines’ of the title where children are exploited to distribute drugs to remote drug dealers outside of major cities.
Khan plays Tyler, a schoolboy who lives with his younger sister and single mother in an inner-city tower block in the heart of London. He’s the ‘man of the house’, his father long gone. Mum Toni struggles to make ends meet cleaning, but Tyler takes his sister to school, helping where he can. However, he and his family are struggling, ends starting not to meet, and there’s little prospect for the future. His mother also goes on nights out leaving him to care for his sibling, often bringing strange men back into the home. School isn’t going well either, opportunities to drop back in line with help from teachers and support workers unsuccessful due to a variety of reasons.
When Tyler is bullied in a local fried chicken shop, he is ‘saved’ by Harris Dickinson’s Simon, a twenty-something local who drives a swish Mercedes and wears trendy clothes. He takes Simon under his wing, first buying him a pair of expensive trailers during an impromptu shopping trip. Simon explains to Tyler that some serious cash can be earned after school by getting on the train and dropping packages at remote locations, an offer that he soon takes up; a decision that will gain him some significant income in his immediate future but will ultimately negatively impact any positive prospects, his physical health, and the relationships with his family at home.
Gritty, raw, hard-hitting, and brilliant performed, Henry Blake’s film is remarkable, both unflinching and utterly heartbreaking. Running at a brisk 90 minutes, the narrative moves at a quick pace, wasting no time in drawing us into this devastating, and shockingly real world. Blake clearly draws from his experience of working as a support worker for a decade, and the result is a very emotional rollercoaster of a feature from this talented new voice. Khan is magnetic as Tyler, so much of his performance conveyed with little or no dialogue, while Ashley Madekwe also stands-out as the mum desperately trying to do good for her family as mother, Toni. Dickinson too is excellent in his brief appearance as Simon, once again delivering on the initial acting promise we saw in his break-out Beach Rats a couple of years ago.
All too real in its depiction of this urgent, ongoing, and devastating issue, County Lines is a gritty, emotional, tour de force, and one of the best debuts we’ve seen from a feature filmmaker this year.
County Lines is released in cinemas and digitally on BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema on 4 December.
County Lines
Summary
