Animol

Adolescence and Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ startlingly assured debut feature opens in darkness. We hear, but don’t see, the panicked aftermath of a knife crime and voices in heated debate as a siren announces the arrival of the police.

Cut to Troy’s rabbit-in-the-headlights stare in the back of a cop wagon. Played by The Long Walk actor Tut Nyuot, he’s a good, if waylaid, kid caught up in a furious world he’s vastly unprepared for.

Thrust into a foreboding brick youth detention centre, all the crueller for its positioning by the freedom of the sea, Troy is stripped naked alongside two fellow detainees. They’re destined to be his good and bad angels. 

Doe-eyed Ukrainian actor Vladyslav Baliuk plays Krystian, a gentle Polish lad even more out of his depth in a brutally unforgiving place where the kind-hearted have no protection from a shiv’s skin slice. That his goofy crime, revealed later, is entirely undeserving of this imprisonment has no bearing on an unbending system.

There’s a crackle of energy between Krystian and Troy that suggests their deep bond could be more than it seems, a source of calm amid this storm of teenage testosterone.

The bad angel, a lithely unnerving Dion (What It Feels Like For a Girl actor Sekou Diaby), has other ideas. Not his first stint inside, Dion holds court as a dealer with a bevy of boys at his command. He presses fellow Black kid Troy into his service, leaving Krystian adrift

Dion is only half Troy’s trouble, with the loose unit energy of his cellmate, Mason (Ryan Dean, The Gentlemen), projecting outsized menace far beyond his diminutive frame. Soon enough, he turns the chemistry brewing between Troy and Krystian against them.

This brilliant British film cares deeply about making us care for these characters

Then there’s the unfinished business with Troy’s recovering addict mum, Dune’s Sharon Duncan-Brewster, whose visits are met with a simmering plate of cold resentment.

If these parts sound familiar, trust that writer Nick Love layers enough unspoken history into each player to ensure this prison drama breaks free from expectations. Nyuot is astonishing in a tight ensemble that also includes Stephen Graham as a counsellor trying to guide these boys to a better place.

Love and Walters’ keen eye for the lads’ wounded and shame-laden masculinity, concealed behind a thick wodge of prison slang, is exhilarating. Illuminated by cinematographer Tasha Back, who leans into a deliberate fuzziness that suits the murky play, the anxious undertones are pumped up by composer Swindle’s edgy score. This brilliant British film cares deeply about making us care for Troy and Krystian, carrying Animol to an intriguingly queer place thrumming with pent-up promise.

Animol premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival.