The lead character in Andrea Arnold's dogme-like first film Red Road has a severe, bony face that matches her manner. Jackie (Kate Dickie) works at an appropriately joyless job: she is the unseen entity behind the surveillance security cameras at an especially bleak, low income, high-rise housing project in Glasgow. Behind the safety of a distant lens, she tracks suspicious characters; when she witnesses a crime, real or potential, she contacts the police. The imminent potential for bodily harm and general suffering: that is how Jackie sees the world.
The necessary distance from squalor and pain, however, is shattered when Jackie recognizes a criminal on her computer monitor. Suddenly, it is no longer sufficient to watch. Jackie takes to the pavement, following and then--inexplicably, troublingly so--entering into the life of a brutish man named Clyde (Tony Curran).
Clyde lives with a younger couple in a small, ugly flat in a top floor of the Red Road housing project: Stevie (Martin Compson) and April (Nathalie Press, who made a tremendous impression in My Summer of Love has little to do, except be unhappy and carry around a cute, little dog.) The rag-tag group accepts the unlikely presence of Jackie without much interest.
Andrea Arnold wants you to worry about Jackie. The stark, slow-moving, score-less narrative refuses to explain why Jackie does what she does--not until the film's very end. Suffice it to say: Red Road is an odd, unsatisfying meditation on grief. By not explaining the motivation behind Jackie's often off-putting actions, Arnold holds her cards too close. This contrivance, unfortunately, keeps the audience at an unbridgeable distance.
