Gravesend

Given that this first feature was written and directed by a 19-year-old, with a cast of unknowns and an initial budget of $5,000, it's hard not to be impressed by its raw, dark tale of four young, white Brooklyn friends who find themselves swept up in a spiralling nightmare after one of their number accidentally kills another's brother in one of his many moments of volatile, psychotically macho aggression. Cue the night-long search for a way, with help from Jojo the junkie, to dispose of the body... or, as it turns out, bodies. There's nothing especially new here, and the narrative is perhaps over-eventful, but Stabile clearly has talent; this is compulsively watchable, blessed by muscular performances, occasional incursions of grisly black humour, and a real sense of pace and place.