This Is Not A Love Song

Two screwed-up hoodlums, Heaton and Spike, meet up outside prison. Spike has just been imprisoned for four months and Heaton realizes he's the only one who can guide Spike back to everyday life. With a brotherly relationship closely linked to the one in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, the guidance, in all its sincerity, is doomed to fail. When their car breaks down in the midst of the Scottish highlands, they have to get help. A misunderstanding between the couple and some local farmers results in tragic death and the two friends have to flee into the mountains with a militia of bloodthirsty countrymen in their footsteps. Clearly inspired by John Boorman's Deliverance (1972) and Walter Hill's Southern Comfort (1981), director Bille Eltringham carries her protagonists through purgatory and injustice before they can find relief. The characters are recognizable - thieves wanting to do right but with the regretful instinct of doing it all wrong. Rejected by society, they come to terms with the fact that nobody really wants them around. Simon Beaufoy's (The Full Monty) script is darker than blue in creating an atmosphere of anguish and weakness and describing how these factors grow stronger when people are marked as outcasts. Johan Lindqvist