The Selfish Giant

In this Oscar Wilde-inspired addition to British cinema’s social realist canon, all of its Bradford milieu is in the gutter, but two boys are looking at the stars. The two young lads are best friends: Arbor (Conner Chapman), a feisty, belligerent, ADHD-suffering scrapper; and Swifty (Shaun Thomas), a gentle giant with an innate knack with horses. Following expulsion from school, they become drawn into a world of horse-cart racing and making money by procuring scrap metal in increasingly dangerous ways for a local roughneck (Sean Gilder).

This second feature from writer-director Clio Barnard (The Arbor) is elevated above its plot’s familiar feel by the astonishing performances she elicits from her two young leads, a sensitively constructed screenplay, and Mike Eley’s cinematography. In this scoreless film the tension of the story naturally builds towards its shocking climax, punctuated only by haunting shots of Bradford’s industrial and natural landscapes. Barnard is definitely a new talent worth watching. [Danny Scott]