9. A Room For Romeo Brass
A Room For Romeo Brass was an early film for director Shane Meadows. It's a great, mostly overlooked British drama, perhaps most notable for introducing Paddy Considine (here, he's mesmerising in his first screen role as Morell). Like all of Meadows' output,
Romeo Brass has an authentic, docu-realist style, following a tentative friendship between two boys living on the same housing estate in Nottinghamshire. Considine plays a local misfit who gets inadvertently befriended by the two boys. He's much older than them, but there's a naive innocence about him. On the surface, he's curiously oafish and idiotic, but over time we get to see a more malevolent, sinister undercurrent to his behaviour. An attempt to woo Romeo's elder sister goes badly for Morell, who begins to turn on the boys... As an examination of male posturing and peer pressure, the film scores highly. Morell's bullying is made all the more creepy by how it does it - quietly, up close, so nobody else can hear - reeking of menace, he's fuelled by a self-loathing reminiscent of De Niro in
Taxi Driver or
Raging Bull. We're given insight into the bored, empty life of a marginal man, crushed by his own inadequacies. Sometimes, people are alone for a reason - Morell illustrates the potential cost of letting a misfit into your world.