With the awards season over and done with, and the first of the year's bona fide event movies still a few weeks off, we have entered one of those cinematic dead zones which is almost entirely populated by the hopeful, the unregarded, and the forsaken. Quite which of these categories the Wolfe brothers' Catch Me Daddy falls into I am not quite sure: this movie has some reasonable clout behind it, in the form of Film Four, if not Screen Yorkshire, and played at Cannes last year, but it is creeping out on a fairly limited release.

I only went to see it, in fact, because I knew less about it than virtually any other film currently showing. (And if you're wondering why I bother going to the cinema when there's nothing on I particularly want to see, you may have a point. But there we are perhaps entering the realms of the pathological.) It's one of those films where most of the plot seems to be in the publicity material, to be honest.

If you go in to see it completely unaware, it may be a while before you work out what the plot actually is. A middle-aged man living in fairly squalid circumstances somewhere in Britain goes about his daily routine, which includes a significant degree of drug abuse. A young mixed-race couple have set up home in a static caravan, in the same part of the world. A group of Asian men gradually assembles, along the way carrying out such idiosyncratic tasks as lining the boot of their SUV with plastic sheeting.

Slowly the truth becomes apparent - the couple, Laila (Sabeena Jabeen Ahmed) and Aaron (Connor McCarron), have run away from her disapproving family and are trying to keep a low profile. But her male relatives are relentless in their desire to punish her for what they see as the disgrace she has heaped on the family, and have hired a couple of unsavoury white 'bounty hunters' (for want of a better term), one of whom, Tony (Gary Lewis), we met at the top of the film. If the hunters catch up with their quarry, an 'honour killing' is on the cards. A long night and a desperate flight are in prospect.

Just to recap, all this is taking place in present-day Britain, and - perhaps more startlingly - this film is being part-funded by Screen Yorkshire, whose mission statement claims its aim 'has always been to... make Yorkshire... one of the most sought after destinations... in the UK'. Hmmm. I have spent many months in Yorkshire. I have innumerable happy memories of the county. Nevertheless, Catch Me Daddy has nearly put me off going anywhere near the place at any point in the future, for it successfully depicts the region as something akin to hell on Earth.

There is a long and mostly respectable tradition of 'it's grim up north' drama in British cinema, and I suppose you could make a good case that Catch Me Daddy belongs to this, but this movie is so unremittingly grim and awful that it's just repellent more than anything else. No-one lives anywhere remotely nice, everyone has some kind of substance abuse problem, you can't walk into a nightclub or tanning salon without a fight breaking out, and Laila emerges as the most sympathetic character not through any positive virtue, but simply because she isn't actually a violently homicidal racist or misogynist, and isn't a workshy drug addict.

And beyond this, the opening sequences of the film are even more of a trial, because the directors have chosen to go for a style which is both grittily naturalistic and ostentatiously arty. So rather than much in the way of dialogue or actual plot, we just have a succession of scenes of people rattling about in caravans and car parks, and shots of people exchanging meaningful (or not) looks, nail varnish, and ears. At one point there is an extended discussion between Ahmed and a non-professional actor about how to make milk shakes and what the best recipes are. To say all this is a bit depressing understates matters.

However, Sabeena Ahmed is not without a certain screen presence (or, indeed, acting talent), and it would be remiss of me to say that Catch Me Daddy is wholly lacking in virtue. An undeniable atmosphere of suspense builds up as the hunters close in, and is maintained, more or less, throughout the middle section of the film. The question, however, is surely one of whether this is a drama about the very real issue of honour killings which is partly framing itself as a thriller to appeal to a wider audience, or a thriller which is seeking to acquire a bit of gravitas by tackling a social problem.

That arty style gives the answer, I think, and tells us that this wants to be a serious drama rather than a pure thriller. It's supported by the fact that watching this film is a largely joyless experience: it's hard to really care about the central characters in any sort of positive way, and there is no humour or other leavening material. Even the early quiet moments between Aaron and Laila are rather downbeat, focusing on the stresses their predicament has put on their relationship.

It's not as if it works consistently as a thriller, either. After a reasonably solid second act, the climax unravels quite badly, with characters behaving in a peculiar and seemingly arbitrary way - not to mention the fact that there are a couple of extremely convenient kidnappings. This leads up to a prolonged climax which seemed to me to be rather fumbled: the film-makers seem to lose their nerve and cop out of delivering the utterly dismal denouement the rest of the film has been promising from the start, possibly out of a realisation that this would make watching the film an utterly negative experience.

Well, cheers for the thought, guys. I'm not going to say that Catch Me Daddy is an out-and-out bad film, because there are some reasonable performances and it is a well-filmed picture. But it's not remotely the kind of film you would go to watch out of a desire to be entertained. The problem is that it doesn't do anything to make you think or care about the problem it depicts - the world of the film is so relentlessly horrible, with no sign of any mitigating features, that you just clench up and wait for it to go away, rather than allow it to affect you in any way. Some promise here, for certain: but a film you should only go to see if you want to be able to reassure yourself that you're a thoughtful, progressive person.

Awix

09.03.15 Front Page

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