(Contains Spoilers)
Turns out the red road is also the high road in Andrea Arnold’s Cannes heavyweight – a panopticon thriller which, borrowing a leaf from the Dardennes’ fablebook, dares its heroine to forgive. In camouflaging the basis of the relationship between Jackie, a CCTV operator, and the mystery man she stakes out though, the film is piloted less by moral ambition, and more by a lust for atmospherics: Indeed, the first 3/4 are spent hung out in free-floating anxiety, surfing between the refuge of her security room and the concrete migraine of a Glasgow housing estate.

Nevertheless, this may be one instance of Y2K surveillance paranoia where the medium isn’t the message: For all the figural doom present, the bubble of Arnold’s vision is never made to burst into the prescriptive. Instead, Glasgow, in its ugly rule of violence, seems to only augment Jackie’s obsession, given that the first time she sees her subject (later revealed as Clyde), it’s over a security monitor as he engages in a display of open-air screwing. Unable to look away, the moment awakens an undeniable strain of masochism in her quest, as she draws herself painfully closer to the ginger-mopped paradigm of barfly sleaze (“I’ve been thinking about what your cunt tastes like,” he drawls upon meeting her one night) and ex-crim cockiness.

On the grounds of their class (and crass) difference, the film soon evolves into a war of opposites – between the murk of surveillance footage and the jagged breathlessness of real life, between her bird-like shyness and his rotweiller charm –, that culminates twice: Into a brilliant, Oasis-backed party scene, where, in the warm pull of red backlights and closedancing, she lets her guard down and then flees in panic; and again in the sex scene, an inconsolable flight of power surges that ends with her in a bathroom at home, hitting herself across the face with a rock and then smearing his semen inside her, all in the name of rape-revenge. What’s disappointing is that, rather than assimilate the pooling tension, this outburst of violence only saps it away, which in the end is like tearing through a blizzard only to find you’ve suddenly reached spring: The razorwire of an unspoken relationship blooms into a basic question of redemption; the pain of withheld fury into an easy pat on the back. In so forcefully throwing her characters into relief, Arnold may be laying down the blueprints for a proposed trilogy... but at what expense? —David Levinson