Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Unlike the Anglophobic negative reviewers who've spewed their venom all over SOHO SQUARE earlier, I will offer a comment on the basis of having watched the whole movie TWICE (the second time with rookie director Jamie Rafn's solo commentary, which is just as succinctly intelligent as the film he made). I easily rated this a 7 after my first viewing, and was only intending on following the director's commentary for five minutes, but Rafn had me hooked for the a 77-minute repeat which was better than deja vu. In the interest of full disclosure, my wife just watched this once and gave it a 4, but I think she only rated MEMENTO 5 or 6 at best. It is galling to see some of the same people who probably degraded this neo noir novella of a flick elevate artsy fartsy crap like Steven Soderbergh's equally experimental SCHIZOPOLIS to a 7.2 average. After all, with a quarter-million dollar budget, much of Hollywood, and an actual nationwide release aiding him, Steve still lost 96% (!) of his working capital on that misbegotten mishmash (going by the sub-$11K U.S. box office). Brownie points should not be heaped upon excruciatingly boring pretentious BS simply because someone is afraid they are too dumb to "get" it!Anyway, aside from the thriftiness of miracle-worker Rafn's $10K total expenditure, a knowledgeable viewer would think there's MORE money being spent here than meets the eye, even given an AVERAGE direct-to-video filming budget. (If you do a quick survey of these sort of titles on IMDb, you'll see they run about a million bucks each.) What the director has done is to use his extensive knowledge of location possibilities in England generally (and London, in particular), plus a lot of friends in right places, along with a canny knowledge of what can and cannot be done with his resources, to milk two thousand per cent more entertainment from his material than Soderbergh did four years earlier with his. Couple this with Rafn's Mac editing wizardry, with a nod to an equally experimental, dissonant soundtrack from Chris Read that perfectly fits the images on-screen, and you end up with something I enjoyed more (at least on a minute-by-minute basis) than the ENGL1SH PATIENT. I've viewed a dozen directorial debuts in the past month, and this is by far the most promising.

From the information posted on IMDb's site I gather this is an opera prima and if so, we might be in presence of a talent to reckon with. The interview with the director included in the DVD clearly shows a person in his twenties, ready to show what he learnt and is capable of.Yes, the first half hour or so is confusing -maybe deliberately so- but I'd say the plot is cleverly exposed and handled. And the way things turn out to be and how the particular murder the film begins with fits into the series of killings the plot centres on is smartly devised. I concur with others, commenting the movie on this website, on the unresolved issue of the neighbour mum and daughter, perhaps a more seasoned film maker would have taken care of that more adroitly; yet a case could me made towards the transposition of the detective's wife and unborn child and hence the attention he gives these otherwise peripheral characters. Criticising slowness in plot progress in European films is common in this side of the Atlantic and it's really no big deal. They make their films evolve at a given pace, US and (some) Latin American film makers prefer a different one, it's a question of personal preference.But in sum, let's follow the work of this young Englishman, for he seems a promising talent.

Anthony Biggs plays the no-name protagonist in this British indie, which starts out blandly enough, like one of those Helen Mirren helmed "Prime Suspect" episodes. As the film progresses, insights are revealed that flesh his character out, and his portrayal is specific and compelling enough to keep you watching. At just the right moment, he chooses to expose facets that make the shocking denouement almost plausible. Director Jamie Rafn plays around with time sequences and jump cuts in a way that's not so much clever as it is jarring. Overall, a very uncomfortable, low-fi, effort that is about anything but the pyromaniacal serial killer supposedly at the focus --- and is all the better for it.

The other user's comment is spot-on, yet much much too kind. This is an absolutely horrible piece of wanna-be cop movie BS. There is absolutely no cohesion to be found in any part of it and I hope that the writer/director/producer finds himself another line of work...perhaps as a sewage plant worker. Seem harsh? You try wasting 78 minutes of your life on this piece of absolutely infected garbage. The only thing I found enjoyable is the "climax" (if you can even bring yourself to consider it that.) The characters are completely poorly developed. The scenes are full of holes, the dialog is barely audible, the music is horrible, the editing is worse, the thinly veiled (strange as hell) pedophilia scenes turn your stomach and you couldn't give a rat's derrière about what happens to any of them. You would almost be glad to see the pyromaniac light fire to the lot of the entire cast (too bad it didn't happen.) Do not, by any means (unless someone involved in the picture is your relative) rent, buy, borrow, or for God's sake watch this piece of trash.