Short Round: Fish Tank (2009) ****/*****

Fish Tank is one of those super bleak, supposedly realist movies that detail the destructive, gross lives of lower class people as they mistreat their children, abuse substances, and generally live in oblivious denial of squalor. Often they get criticized as being less a real depiction of the lower class and more a form of misery porn crafted to let you gain some sort of vampiric glee off the suffering of others; but I’ve seen some creepy shit in poor areas and I think movies like this get things more right than they do wrong. I can only point to a few examples, like Precious, that I would call deliberately provocative. And certainly I would defend something as good as Fish Tank as being told with a true voice. This one is about a teenage girl, growing up with a pretty young, pretty bad single mother, whose life gets thrown into upheaval when her mom starts bringing a new, mysteriously captivating boyfriend around the house. The boyfriend is played by Michael Fassbender, and that should be enough to get you to see the movie right there, but despite him giving one of his usual captivating performance, there’s also a lot of other stuff that Fish Tank has going for it. The leading actress, Katie Jarvis, gives a solid performance as a conflicted youth and proves herself more than capable of anchoring a film. There’s a sinister edge that plays around this movie, brought to life effectively by the script and the direction, which always keeps you wondering as to where it’s going and how gross things are going to get. Really, Fish Tank is able to build a ton of tension just by keeping you guessing as to what kinds of people its characters are. And when the stuff does finally start hitting the fan, when we reach our climaxes of destructive behavior, they’re so gross that they hit you in the stomach; but they always subvert themselves and go in unexpected directions as well. Fish Tank is a well-made, interesting film, and I would recommend that people go out of their way to check it out. Just be ready for some uncomfortable awkwardness when people start behaving badly, and trust that writer/director Andrea Arnold will actually be able to find some heart at the end of all the shit.