By Sandra Hall
★★★
MA, 99 minutes
For seven years, Chad Cutler (Michael Fassbender) has been a dutiful son and an imperfect father.
Testing times: Michael Fassbender (left) and Brendan Gleeson in Trespass Against Us.Credit: Umbrella
We get a demonstration of his parenting skills in the opening scenes of British director Adam Smith's Trespass Against Us. He's at the wheel of a car zigzagging across a meadow at high speed in pursuit of an unfortunate rabbit while his young son, perched on his lap, is permitted to take charge of the steering.
In his saner moments, however, he's seen lecturing the boy, Tyson (Georgie Smith), on the importance of going to school. The lectures are necessary because Tyson prefers the advice of his grandfather, Colby, who believes that education is codswallop.
A film poster for Trespass Against Us.
Colby is played by Brendan Gleeson, whose wily, manipulative influence powers the film. He's a smiling tyrant whose threats are veiled in creepy banalities. "Dogs can only play with cats for so long before it's the dog that gets scratched," he tells Chad's protesting wife, Kelly (Lyndsey Marshal), who's such an unlikely candidate for life as a Cutler that even Fassbender's sex appeal fails to account for her presence among the clan.
The film is a first feature from Smith, who comes from television and music videos, and screenwriter Alastair Siddons, whose earlier films were documentaries, and they've framed the story as a contemporary Western set in rural Somerset. The Cutlers are outlaws who have set themselves up in a cluster of caravans with a ragged bunch of criminal accomplices. Most evenings are spent around the campfire, listening to Colby unload his twisted musings on Jesus – a fellow outlaw – and the hypocrisies of law-abiding society. But now and then, the boys pile into one of their cars and ram-raid somebody's stately home.
Once you get your bearings and sort everybody out, the film's main attraction lies in watching Chad's long overdue attempts to squirm out of Colby's grip. While he bristles at his father's malign effect on Tyson, he vacillates, unable to make the break and adopt an existence which would mean making peace with his old enemy, the local cop, played by Rory Kinnear with gleefully applied lashings of smarmy condescension.
The main problem with this is that Fassbender looks and sounds much too smart and sophisticated for a character who's never learnt to read, write or master the kind of destructive impulse on show in the opening scene. In his calmer moments, he seems so controlled that Colby's dominance over him is impossible to understand. Nonetheless, Gleeson's command of his role is so convincing and his inventory of Colby's odious ploys so imaginatively arranged that you can't look away.