Film

Mia (Jarvis) is an angry British teen with a taste for booty-shaking hip-hop. She’s constantly at loggerheads with Mum (Wareing) and Sis (Rebecca Griffiths), but when Mom’s mysterious new boyfriend (Fassbender) moves in with them, she slowly lowers her defenses—much to her disadvantage. His name is Connor, and he’s a wolf among lambs. Credit the actors with raising the bar on writer-director Andrea Arnold’s Loach-lite coming-of-age story, which—like her morose sorta-revenge thriller, Red Road—is an assured piece of phoniness. Yet even as Arnold too neatly sums up the characters’ troubles time and again (e.g., cueing Nas’s “Life’s a Bitch” during the film’s emotional apex), the performers find kernels of truth in every scene.

A thudding subplot in which Mia attempts to rescue a chained-up white horse is nonetheless touching thanks to Jarvis’s brash assurance—she’s a real find. And Fassbender is unsurprisingly brilliant at blurring the lines between his character’s paternal and carnal affections: A scene in which he carries the half-awake Mia up to bed and gently undresses her is beautifully queasy and ambiguous (the primary sound is his metronomically guarded breathing).

Yet Fish Tank is still a grimy kitchen-sink melodrama with an Ajax cleanser script: The muck is all surface, the turmoil cleanly shallow and contrived, though never less than gripping. The film builds to a soused, matter-of-fact sex scene meant to profoundly complicate Mia and Connor’s relationship. But rather than honestly and directly dealing with the fallout, Arnold deviates into a generic retribution plot that acts as a creaky catalyst to push Mia out into the world at large. The affected realism thus reveals itself to be a hoi polloi–patronizing crock.