Wasteman film review: Painfully tense
A strong addition to the British prison drama sub-genre which elevates two rising stars even further
The deserving recipient of BAFTA’s Rising Star Award last year, David Jonsson has impressed in the likes of Rye Lane, Alien: Romulus and The Long Walk alongside TV’s Industry. He shows more evidence of his extraordinary range in this pressure cooker prison drama where he’s paired with the similarly versatile Tom Blyth (The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes, Plainclothes).
Cal McMau makes his directorial debut with a film that follows Jonsson’s Taylor, a drug addict who’s desperately close to the end of a significant prison stretch. Having been granted parole due to overcrowding, Taylor is hoping to keep his head down and reunite with his estranged son. However, when cocky dealer Dee (Blyth) becomes Taylor’s new cellmate he starts encroaching on the territory of existing top dogs Paul and Gaz (Alex Hassell and Corin Silva) and Taylor finds himself in the middle of a turf war.
The British penal system has long provided fascinating fodder for drama, with the BBC’s recent six-parter Waiting For The Out joining the likes of Scum, Starred Up, Time, and even Paddington 2. Wasteman makes a fine addition to that list. With McMau amping up the inescapability of Taylor’s predicament, as well as his surroundings, this urgent and painfully tense feature is a superb platform for showstopping work from Jonsson and Blyth, though a tantalisingly cast Hassell (who shot to our attention as Rupert Campbell-Black in TV’s Rivals) feels underused. Screenwriters Hunter Andrews and Eoin Doran paint a depressingly credible picture of an overstretched and inhumane institution that makes it as difficult as possible for people to turn their lives around.
Wasteman is in cinemas from Friday 20 February.