Peter Mullan's film about Glasgow's Non-Educated Delinquents is not quite as straightforward as it may at first seem: there are some fairly common elements (the bright kid trying to learn his way out of poverty, the drunken father, the violent street gangs) but also some odd, surreal imaginative scenes, and an overall narrative that grows more opaque the longer the film lasts. It's the scenes set at school, which showcase the diversity of approaches employed by the teaching staff, that are most powerful, making the point that if your rear children as animals, animals are what you're going to get out the other end. The almost total absence of any positive virtues: humour, love, progress are all absent from the narrative; ultimately make for hard watching. Mullan himself is mesmeric in a small role, but the failure to make that role more central is just one of the film's narrative oddities; as a writer, Mullan could have done with some help to better shape his material.
Review of Neds
