by Paul Mount
He’s best known for his stand-up comedy and as a writer/actor (the cult BBC3 sitcom How Not To Live Your Life), but Dan Clarke’s first feature film as writer and director is a brittle, sharply-observed post-Brexit comedy thriller that could really only exist right now. The film reflects the grim reality of a Britain that seems to have lost its way and left its population with no choice but to make its own choices just to keep its head above water in a world that wants it to drown. This is a film about a trio of people thwarted by life and the hand that fate has dealt them – they’re all frustrated and disappointed by their lives – who find themselves in an extraordinary situation that ultimately seems to offer them all a way to a better life. But things never seem to go quite the way they hope…
Maggie (a kinetic performance from Kelly Wenham) is a struggling actress who just can’t get a break. Her boyfriend Brian (Jack Parry-Jones, simmering and understated) is a tech head working on the taxis until he can afford to enrol on a computer course. Hardy (the always-brilliant Patrick Baladi) is an underachieving politician who has fallen down the Parliamentary cracks. With eviction and poverty looming, Maggie and Brian leap at the chance to change their circumstances by kidnapping Hardy, holing up at a remote air B&B and demanding a ransom from Hardy’s wife. But, surprisingly, Hardy has been a bad boy, and his wife doesn’t want him back. Like the best/worst politicians, Hardy seizes the chance to slyly and deviously manipulate the situation to his advantage whilst driving a wedge between Maggie and Brian as they struggle to keep control of a chain of events that they’re entirely unequipped to deal with.
A Kind of Kidnapping is a sharp, biting and at times downright hilarious caper, leanly and economically directed, balancing drama and humour as it adroitly develops its characters and their dilemmas by the skilful use of flashbacks, toying with narrative structure in a way reminiscent of early Tarantino. It’s a device that can annoy or frustrate audiences, but here, Clarke cleverly initially gives us just enough about the lives of his dramatis personae to make us invest in them and genuinely care about how they found themselves in this unenviable position so that when events threaten to spiral out of control – and of course they do – we care about them all (even the odious Hardy) even when they do seriously terrible things.
A Kind of Kidnapping is a vital, urgent slice of modern British cinema, rude and crude (too crude perhaps for sniffier critics) but powerful, compelling and utterly contemporary. The performances are all terrific; Wenham and Parry-Jones sizzle, and Baladi is clearly having a great time playing against type as Hardy and Dan Clarke fans will enjoy the cheeky cameo from How Not To Live Your Life’s Leila Hoffman. This is a film that’s likely to sail under the radar, particularly in the white heat of the summer blockbuster season, but Clarke has crafted an intelligent, engrossing, fiercely funny, and surprisingly dark movie that defies its undoubtedly tiny budget, and you need to track it down and check it out as a matter of some urgency.
A Kind of Kidnappingis screening at selected UK cinemas now and is available digitally on July 24th.
