Movie reviews: Starred Up

There’s tough love, and then there’s Eric Love. Starred Up (16s) tells the story of young Eric Love (Jack O’Connell), a violent young offender who finds himself catapulted into the big leagues when his recidivist behaviour earns him a transfer to a prison for adults. Rather than being cowed by the tense atmosphere in which he finds himself, Eric seems to thrive on the aggression, actively seeking out opportunities to fight with other inmates. It’s his abrasive relationship with the prison hard-man Neville (Ben Mendelsohn), his father, that provides David Mackenzie’s drama with its narrative spine, while the clash in styles between Neville’s rudimentary parenting and the anger management therapy espoused by prison therapist Oliver (Rupert Friend) offers Eric options that will define the rest of his life. It sounds pretty straightforward, but despite the expected and regular outbursts of vicious brutality, Starred Up presents us with a number of complex and subtle relationships, all of them revolving around a variety of responses to threat, fear, intimidation and violence. Mackenzie convincingly recreates the nightmarish claustrophobia of prison life, centring it on a brilliantly ambivalent performance from O’Connell as a charismatic sociopath who is fully aware of how he has been shaped by his social conditioning. Mendelsohn and Friend, meanwhile, provide very strong support, with Friend playing a well-meaning therapist who is every bit as institutionalised as his charges, and Mendelsohn creepily believable as an old-lag lifer with nothing left to lose.