Written and directed by Andrea Arnold, Red Road is an intense look at what it means to genuinely confront your past. Since its release in 2006, Red Road has been nominated for over 20 awards, including the internationally revered Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Life of a CCTV Operator
Jackie (played by Kate Dickie), a quiet and somewhat depressed 30-something, works as a CCTV operator in Glasgow, Scotland. Her daily routine is rather mundane – with the exception of multiple tea and cigarette breaks, she spends the majority of her life sitting before a wall of television screens, watching the lives of others, waiting for anything suspicious and/or dangerous to happen in case she needs to phone the police.
For the most part, Jackie keeps to herself, putting in her 8 hours a day and then retreating to her one-bedroom flat to sit in silence until she goes to bed. It’s clear that she’s missing something, that Jackie has deep feelings of loneliness; she tries to fill the void with a meaningless affair with a man named Avery (Paul Higgins).
Jackie’s Haunting Past Appears Before Her
It is on one of these banal days that a familiar face appears on one of Jackie’s CCTV screens. It belongs to Clyde Henderson (Tony Curran), a man Jackie never expected to see walking freely through the streets of Glasgow again. She becomes instantly obsessed with finding out where he is living, which turns out to be the Red Road scheme block on the outskirts of the city, and starts to follow him via CCTV.
Desperate to learn more, and to potentially find a reason to get the police after him, Jackie leaves the world of the observer and goes to Red Road to find Clyde. What she doesn’t expect, however, is to see a more human side to the man who destroyed her life just years prior. With two teenagers, Stevie and April (Martin Compston and Natalie Press), living in his flat with him, Clyde welcomes Jackie into his home during a party. An interest develops between them – is this Clyde’s chance to start over? He may think so, but Jackie has other plans.
Red Road a Quiet, Intense, and Brilliantly Executed Film
It’s amazing that with very little action to start, you still become completely engrossed in Andrea Arnold’s film. The idea of being under constant surveillance due to CCTV in many large cities has been the cause of much controversy and debate in many parts of the world, but when you watch Jackie watching regular people go about their lives, you can’t help but get involved. Without words or sound, you still want to know what will happen to the man with the ailing bulldog, or the cleaning girl who has a crush on one of her co-workers. You feel instantly as though you are one of those people, as though you know them.
Red Road also raises questions of good and evil, and whether any single person can embody only one of those traits. Throughout the film, you will sympathize with Jackie and wish poor things upon Clyde, and then the entire situation reverses, leaving you hating Jackie for her actions and hoping that Clyde can get on with his life. In the end, the wonderfully written and skilfully acted Red Road shows us is that we are all human: flawed, yes, but also emotional. So at which point do we become a good or bad person? What constitutes right and wrong? And at which point is forgiveness acceptable, or even required?
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