Excuse me? You can’t help but do a double take when you learn that Danny Dyer, wide boy idol of Human Traffic and Severance, has teamed up with Gillian Anderson, People magazine’s Most Beautiful Woman 1997-8, for a sick vigilante fantasy. Good for them.
When you finally get your head around the notion of the geek’s goddess keeping young Mr. Dyer as a bit of rough, Straightheads, the debut feature from writer-director Dan Reed, has more curveballs in its armoury. Returning from a countryside bacchanalia, the unlikely couple have an unfortunate encounter with some lawless yokels. He almost loses an eye. She is brutally raped. Together, they plot a terrible revenge.
Taking several cues from Straw Dogs, Mr. Reed’s finely crafted film displays considerable aptitude for the rape-revenge dynamic and scant regard for plausibility. Let’s get this straight – Ms. Anderson inherits a house near the site of the attack and just happens on one of the perpetrators? Hmm.
We’ll let it slide but only because Straightheads (a criminal term for the criminally impaired) makes such chilling use of the forbidding rural England favoured by the Countryside Alliance. The grotesque dramatic payoff is also worth waiting around for. Who’d have thought that Scully was capable of acts normally reserved for imperial agents in Latin America?