Eddie Marsan and Romola Garai star in Tinge Krishnan's bravely artistic debut feature.
Tinge Krishnan's debut feature opens with an acute awareness of the human body that I assume comes from her days as a doctor. Frank is hyperventilating and his heart is racing, he's sweating profusely as his body struggles to cope with the strain his mind puts on it. Fixated with an incident from his days in the IRA, he drinks alone in his flat, repeating these tightly framed scenes of panic and fright.
These scenes plunge the audience into a heightened reality fuelled by the frenetic mind of Krishnan's disturbed character (played flawlessly by Eddie Marsan). The camera searches his blotchy, aged face like an eye and Krishnan employs the same effective technique with Lynette, a homeless teenager. When Lynette holds Frank to account for the lack of humanity she so desperately needs, the two clumsily and carefully try to be generous towards each other.
Their 'unlikely friendship' abuses this tag a little before it gets into something horrifyingly cruel and yet somehow hopeful. Krishnan never lets us trust our own judgement and when we meet Lynette's charming boyfriend, things only get worse.
Between their scenes we see Romola Garai as a wealthy but struggling single mother. Far removed from Frank's little council flat, her life is barely held together by the nanny, while sex and drugs distract her. Her story feels clichéd, predictable and a bit pointless, so it's to Krishnan's great credit that by the end of Junkhearts she manages to win us over to Garai's plight and presents us with a surprisingly hopeful ending.
Full of close-ups and splattered with coarse phrasing, that feels so blunt and unreal it almost definitely isn't, Krishnan's Junkhearts is guilty of all the same excesses as a short film, but in a gloriously visceral, boldly artistic way.
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