Laila, a girl on the run from her family is hiding out in West Yorkshire with her drifter boyfriend Aaron. When her brother arrives in town with a gang of thugs in tow, she is forced to flee for her life and faces her darkest night.
A bold and uncompromising debut feature from a bright new directing team. There’s a question over whether it justifies its own misery, but if you care about homegrown cinema then you have to see it.
Blending the mythical resonances of The Searchers with lyricism and bristly realism, Wolfe’s harrowing, haunting dispatch from Brit-cinema’s undergrowth is strong meat: emphatic evidence of a bold talent’s arrival.
Catch Me Daddy does have its flaws. Most of the Pakistani pursuers are little more than one-dimensional thugs and the ending is more likely to frustrate than intrigue, but this is still a British debut of great promise from a duo intent on matching poetic style with gritty substance.
Lots to like, but with too much of an uneasy ironic distance from its subjects.
This is ambitious work from a promising talent.
Catch Me Daddy is at the same time so lyrical and so unsparing that it becomes something more than just a genre film; something more like a poetic-realist fugue and a despairing howl at the state of contemporary Britain.
Expressionist cinematography raises this tale of a threatened ‘honour’ killing in Yorkshire beyond mere social realism.
Daniel Wolfe
Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow from Friday March 13, 2015, until Thursday March 19, 2015. More info: http://www.glasgowfilm.org/theatre/
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