zulus88 Dan Reed, an award winning documentary director, débuts with a thriller that will only be watched for its self proclaimed shock value and soon forgotten for the lack of this and, quite frankly, any value whatsoever.Alice's (Gillian Anderson) and Adam's (Danny Dyer) meeting is one of a chance. After he installs an alarm system in her upper class apartment, she invites him to a dull house warming party in a countryside in the unlike role of a sex toy. Their accident is one of a chance too. Alice hits a deer and they are both forced to pull over to remove the suffering animal from the road. There, they are attacked by three men they passed by earlier on. Adam is brutally beat up and Alice's raped. After one month recovery, she manages to return to work and Adam, with one eye blind and his face scarred stays locked at her home, struggling to overcome his accident inflicted impotence. When Alice learns of her father's death she drives to the countryside again where she encounters one of the rapists. She persuades Adam to take revenge they supposedly deserve.Reed, with a brief 76 minutes running time, skips any unnecessary expositions but unfortunately in the process, looses most of the motivation for both the characters and the audience. What's left is paper thin. Dyer is his own, low class, laddish caricature and Anderson's middle aged, sexy businesswoman is played on a hysterical autopilot. Even their unlikely affair is played out with no true interest in an inevitable contrast they create. It seems that they both serve a foolish, deus ex machina plot where Reed's main moral concern is whether the revenge is not even more dehumanizing than animalistic behaviour that provokes it. He's bend on making a statement but with no interest in the process, he jumps right to the end far to quickly and makes the whole experience unconvincing and uninteresting.Straightheads, for the most part, plays out like a character film but the little emotional intimacy that the characters actually share, is blown away by the outbursts of violence and sex. They do little more but emphasize the growing brutalization of Adam and Alice-something so painfully obvious and insubstantial that it's difficult to find any justification for the grim tones that film hits. In its attempt on deep, structured emotional insight into the life post trauma, it seems to be too brief and relies too strongly on in-your-face violence to awake any serious afterthought.And even despite its length, Straightheads is a drag. With 20 minutes of deleted footage available on the DVD, it looks like it wasn't really sure of its narration's rhythm. It ultimately emphasizes little of the tension and drama that first rate thriller should provide and instead it dwells on cheap, worn out psychology. The metamorphosis of Adam and Alice is foreseeable and because of that disengaging. As the film, unbearably slowly, drifts towards its conclusion, Dyer's restrained pansy regresses into a violent psycho and the film reaches its feeble ending with no constructive point. It all ends too abruptly with ambiguity that is usually reserved for films of explicit intellectual strength. But Adam's stare on the audience remains empty- a worthless gesture, a last failed stunt committed by a film of a stunning, obscure numbness.Verdict: Straightheads seems like a challenging attempt but comes across as to scared of any serious commitment to its brutal, provocative subject. Instead it will try to shock you with relentless, gruesome images but it's all just a sombre bore. It recalls visceral, nauseating power of Straw Dogs and Irreversible but is nowhere near as engaging, original or graphic.1.5/5

robert-connor An unpleasant woman and an equally unpleasant man are violently and horribly assaulted by a group of two-dimensional psycho thugs during a night-time encounter on a forest road in Shropshire, England. The man and woman who were assaulted plan and carry out a revenge attack on their attackers...Utterly repellent piece of voyeuristic trash, somehow masquerading as 'thought-provoking' drama, whilst actually coming across as sub-Michael Winner cr*p (you just know that Oliver Reed and Susan George would have been cast had it so easily have been made in the 1970s). What happens to Alice (Gillian Anderson) and Adam (Danny Dyer) is appalling and devastating, yet Dan Reed somehow manages to rub the viewer's nose in every last glob of its sexual nastiness. His camera lingers hungrily on Anderson's naked body both during and after the assault, whilst the script leaves almost all the characters floundering in a turgid sea of two dimensional cliché. His script forces his characters to behave in such a way as to alienate the viewer further from the 'victims' by shoving more ghastly situations into their faces (Adams's attempted post-incident assaults on both Sophie and Alice; Alice's assault on Heffer AFTER his suicide-attempt confession).The quandary comes from the central protagonists' performances - Dyer is a horrible actor, incapable of light and shade as the young male victim of the initial assault (he'll end up in Eastenders, mark my words), but Anderson is extraordinary. Even as the atrocious script forces her character to behave in depraved and ludicrous ways, she somehow delivers an extraordinarily compelling and complicated characterisation as a self-indulgent, arrogant hedonist who encounters such horrors and needs to retaliate.A vile and pointless film then, almost but not quite rescued by a compelling central female performance.

Rupert17 A young couple are beaten and raped on the way home from a party in the English countryside. The nature of their relationship has all the hallmarks of a transitory sexual dalliance. Alice, a well-educated professional woman, played by the tremendous Gillian Anderson, and Adam played by Danny Dyer, a younger man installing an elaborate security system in her apartment. An unlikely couple thrown together by lust and opportunity whose connection takes on a much more complex and ambiguous character after the horrific events following the party and then the fortuitous chance to take revenge on the perpetrators.What appears to be a tale of revenge is really a healing process where uncertainty and doubt surround the quest of the two victims and eventually a denouement where separate solutions are sought and an outcome where fulfillment remains elusive.I really liked the way director Dan Reed handled the interplay between Alice and Adam after their terrible experience and explored the shifting ground of their relationship, complicated by contact with one of the perpetrators whose actions appear not to be motivated by criminal intent but something rather more understandable. Flawed but fascinating. 8/10

steve-3567 Although I use this site quite frequently to see how other people rated what I think are challenging or just plain enjoyable films, after watching this "movie" on Film Four last night I felt compelled to write something down, even if it just helps cleanse me once again.The film was possibly the shallowest experience I've ever had - the main characters played by Danny Dyer (23? You sure?) and Gillian Anderson (who will always be Scully as Leonard Nimoy will always be Spock) had no real substance about them - I'm not sure if the first half-hour of the film didn't make the final cut but surely in a revenge movie you would like some empathy with the victims... here I couldn't care less. In fact, the only character I did seem to care about was the dog, with the stag coming a close second. And both animals out-acted Dire (sic) and Scully, who were quite frankly terrible. I guess though you're only as good as the script you are given, and I'd like to warmly thank the writers, the producers, the director and all of the cast for wasting 90 minutes of my life and some perfectly good electricity.