Film Review | NEDS

The well-worn adage that crime doesn’t pay is illustrated with harrowing precision in Peter Mullan’s latest effort, a coming-of-age tale set in 70s Glasgow to the milieu of knife-wielding youth gangs.

NEDS, Mullan’s first feature since the equally indignant expose The Magdalene Sisters (2002), is definitely not a film you’d want to pop into for solace during these stormy winter days. But while its title unambiguously declares as much – standing for Non-Educated Delinquents – but really, what’s the alternative? Between 3D gnomes, inane rom-coms and yet another Xeroxed Statham extravaganza, the prospects aren’t too promising. What’s worse is that some of the main Oscar contenders – namely The King’s Speech and Black Swan – have yet again been pushed back, inexplicably.But if you can stomach it, Mullan crafts an unrelenting bit of social realism that will stay with you.

Dogged by an alcoholic father (played by Mullan himself) and haunted by the legend of his gangster brother, the ambitious schoolboy John McGill (Gregg Forrest, later played by Conor McCaron) doesn’t exactly have a head-start in life, as his dreams are  compromised by his background at every step of the way.

Upon graduation, John is cruelly stopped by a boy who threatens to rough him up the second he steps into secondary school.
Surrounded by disaffection and violence, John ends up drifting into gang life, compromising his future behind his own back.

Apart from everything else, McCaron’s performance is truly impressive – even more so for being his debut: Mullan sourced his actors from the local Glasgow milieu, and the authenticity and scruffiness of youth carries across – resulting in an even more tragic brew, in the end. Add to this the fact that Mullan drew a lot of the film from his own upbringing (particularly in the film’s early stages), and you’ve got yourself an impeccably realist bit of harsh, historical drama.

It is an uncompromising world, to be sure. Intensely tribalised, the gangs almost can’t help but dominate the cultural life of their surroundings, even though parents and authority figures (not to mention the bluntly ineffective school system) appear entirely oblivious as to how to deal with the problem, and even appear blind to it (illustrated with an unexpected burst of wry humour during a scene in which John is offered tea and biscuits by a rival gang member’s mother). It is also a deeply masculine world… one in which women, when they feature, are either clueless mums or just-as-clueless part-time lovers.

If there is a downside to Mullan’s striving for authenticity, I would say the decision to go for an unmitigated Glaswegian dialect might just have been his greatest gamble (indeed, online commentators bemoaned a lack of subtitles). But if it worked for Trainspotting, why wouldn’t it work here too?

A more objective flaw would be the film’s pacing, particularly come the third act. As the autobiographical elements grow out of the story to give way to the fiction, things lose urgency, and it begins to seem as if Mullan has lost control of the characters.

Nevertheless, a surreal encounter and an unexpected walk through wildlife sear themselves into our brain as the film draws to a close.