A Film Review Nil By Mouth

Nil by Mouth (1997)

Nil By Mouth A Film Review

Gary Oldman has made a harsh and brutal film that is very disturbing and utterly compelling, about a working class family living on a council estate in east London.

From the opening credits the focus of the film is Ray a very violent and disturbed man, married to Val who is pregnant with their second child. Around this couple are Val’s brother Billy, a heroin addict, Janet, Val’s mother and Kath, Val’s grandmother.

What we are confronted with throughout the film is the suffering and poverty of these people’s lives. Janet watches helplessly as her son Billy slides further and further into heroin addiction and her daughter Val is beaten up by Ray in a obsessive and jealous rage killing his unborn child.

Ray is a man tortured by his own upbringing particularly his relationship with his father. In the most powerful scene in the film Ray, drunk and full of rage and despair Ray tries to grapple and overcome his pain and anger of the past; to take control of his emotions instead of allowing them to control him.

The acting is outstanding. Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke are totally convincing.

By the end of the film there is a sense of reconciliation the family gathered around a kitchen table. Ray has redecorated and fixed the flat he had earlier demolished and quietly accepts the compliment from his mother in law.

The hope for Val and Ray lies in that one expression of Ray’s quiet humility.

It is so different from the blind and uncontrolled monster that dominates the film that casts a sinister and dangerous shadow, a Kurtz figure presiding over a modern day wasteland.

The setting is November around these South London concrete and graffiti estates. it is always dark, claustrophobic, a yellow anaemic florescent light illuminates abandoned walkways and faces filled with fear and pain.

The film is a harrowing and breath taking achievement from beginning to end, difficult to watch but harder to turn away from.