Low budget

The trouble with posting about low budget indie British films that have, somehow, managed to scrape a cinema release, is that it's really hard to get any decent images.


Fortunately I managed to root out a few from The Disappearance of Alice Creed, so can report that the film is, in fact, rather interesting.


It has just three actors and is very tightly plotted -- but unlike most British features with tiny casts it doesn't feel like a stage play that's been transplanted into an alien medium.


Instead, in true Hitchcockian style, we're introduced to a rather nasty world, where plots twist unexpectedly half-way through, and that is populated with cynical and amoral people (even the victims turn out to be not so nice). It felt to me like a more serious Shallow Grave -- which is praise indeed.


But it also stars Eddie Marsan (whose brilliant character with mental health issues stole the show for me in Happy-Go-Lucky), Gemma Arterton (at last, a naked actress with the body of a real woman rather than a stick insect), and last, but by no means least, Martin Compston (the eponymous teenage star of Sweet Sixteen):


It turns out that Martin has a massive cock. A penis of epic proportions, in fact. Massive... really massive. Blimey.

Back to the film...

As I was watching The Disappearance of Alice Creed it reminded me a little of The Hide, the last low-budget indie British movie I watched.


That film starred Alex Macqueen (the genius who plays the oleaginous and pointless adviser Julius Nicholson in brilliant political satire The Thick of It), and it's a two-hander set almost entirely in a bird hide on the Suffolk salt marshes.


Also nasty, with black humour and lashings of twists and turns (who is the victim, exactly?); but The Hide never managed to shake off its theatrical origins. It felt like a small play, designed for a tiny theatre above a pub somewhere in Islington or Hampstead or Earl's Court.


And, as you can tell, it was impossible to find any decent stills.

My friend D. didn't care for The Disappearance of Alice Creed at all -- he thought it was far too nasty and bleak.

I loved it.


Oh, and Martin Compston is my new special lust object. He's lovely, he is...