Run

The choice is to get through or wallow in the thick brogue of the cast of Run. Either way this is a very interesting, illuminating and entertaining film about a worker in a fish factory who over one-night rediscovers youthful recklessness and what he really has in life.

Finnie (Mark Stanley) languishes in a non-rewarding job in a fish factory in the fishing town of Fraserborough that also employs his son Kid (Anders Mason) who after a dispute is fired. He didn’t want it anyway but Kid’s girlfriend Kelly (Marli Siu) is pregnant he needs it. This sets of a confrontation with Finnie whose life is not fulfilled having got married young to Katie (Amy Mason) at a similar age to Kid’s. There’s a row and Finnie take’s Kids car to the local youth gathering area where he meets Kid’s acquaintances and Kelly.

Challenged Finnie drag-races the car through the streets of derelict shops and down to the docklands keeping as close to the sea wall as possible with the waves crashing over is an exhilarating high-speed sequence, dramatically lit by the town's streetlights superbly directed by Scott Graham (Shell, Iona) and photographed by Simon Tindall. Finnie clearly frustrated with his own life and that of the wasted opportunities that Kid has makes a rash, bordering on mad decision.

Graham also wrote Run and he’s got a stone-cold grasp of the dialogue as well as the frustrations, dashed ambitions and ultimate resignation of a character who through a combination of bad luck and poor judgement is stuck in a place he didn’t envisage being in. But ultimately for all the pent-up fury is he really that badly off with a loving wife and two boys?

The performances are uniformly excellent with Stanley a towering presence throughout the film (which is short at 76 minutes) he’s surly and difficult though his heart is ultimately in the right place. Finnie in some respects cuts a tragic figure representing small town frustration and his son a continuity of that; stuck in a place that so easily sucks at life desiccating it until there is only a husk of existence that is passed on through the generations. Run isn’t that dismal or revel in hopelessness but it very much teeters on that brink.