In 2006 a tiny-budgeted nasty thriller called London To Brighton burst onto our screens, painting a bleak picture of a broken Britain and making a star out of the stunning girl lead, Georgia Groome. Now, six years later, it seems not much has changed Britain is still broken, we’re still making gut-wrenching films about the violence bubbling just beneath the surface and we have another girl actor whose performance will steal your heart.
While London To Brighton was more of a gangster thriller, Broken has a far more mundane setting, a cul-de-sac that could be straight out of The Good Life. Here lives Skunk, a girl just about to start secondary school, which is terrifying her, but apart from that life is fine she plays in the nearby junkyard where she lets her imagination run free. Not even her type-1 diabetes is too much to get her sunny disposition down, and she is much loved by her solicitor dad (Tim Roth).
The setting might be utterly ordinary but violence is never far away in Skunk’s life. She witnesses her neighbour Bob (Roy Kinnear) assault her other neighbour Rick, a boy who appears to be mentally disturbed and who Bob believes has made sexual advances to his young daughters. Despite the attack it is Rick who is taken away by the police, much to Skunk’s bafflement.
She witnesses further upsets when her teacher (Cillian Murphy) splits up with her nanny, and she herself is then bullied at school by one of Bob’s three ghastly, dysfunctional daughters. Even getting her first boyfriend proves to be more heartache than joy, and the drama goes in a circle to provide a devastating climax that is as shocking as it is heartbreaking.
What makes Broken so powerful is that old adage get the details right and the rest will fall into place. Skunk’s world is the classic one of the pre-school girl, with toys in her bedroom and a teasing brother, but in which her real escape is her own imagination in the fields beyond the drab home. She is surrounded by violence but refuses to change her personality, and in that respect the film does offer an optimistic theme amongst the carnage. When she shouts “Everything goes wrong at her dad it’s a genuinely moving moment.
Presumably the title is a reference to Broken Britain, and the film does seem to offer a microcosm of what’s wrong with the UK today. Bob’s three daughters are foul-mouthed, slatternly, drunk and borderline psychotic, but we learn at one point that their mother died suddenly, leaving Bob with a seemingly impossible task raising them. He may be a monster, thrashing out with his fists every time they are threatened, but there is a sympathetic man inside there somewhere.
Perhaps it’s too neat to have these three families living literally next door to each other, but if you can swallow that slightly stage-bound conceit, then there is much to recommend here. Not the least of these are the performances. Usually we might expect Roth to play the psycho, but here director Norris goes for Kinnear, who is a revelation unrecognisable from his role in Skyfall. Here he is a brute of a man, punching anyone who comes near him. In one scene, where Roth tries to reason with him, he eats a plate of ham in the most menacing style imaginable.
Roth as the sympathetic dad is just superb, teasing his daughter, happy to tickle her but queasily unable to give her the injections she needs she unfussily does it herself. That leaves us with Eloise Laurence as Skunk. She may have got some help from her mum, Clara Burt, who plays the disturbed neighbour’s mother, but even so, this is a performance as astonishing as Georgia Groome’s in London To Brighton, and that is high praise indeed.
A completely ordinary, unglamorous-looking girl, she is vulnerable, cheeky, playful and utterly beguiling. It’s unshowy, natural acting and all the more heartbreaking for it, the highest praise should head her way.
Overall verdict: Punchy, powerful, multi-layered and devastating portrayal of the country we live in today, told in a concise, vivid manner and with supreme performances from all of the actors involved. Highly recommended.
Reviewer: Mike Martin