Best movie of this year hands down!

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This low-budget Scottish indie is worth looking up. It moves quickly, with engagement and suspense, and gives us some things to think about in the age of Edward Snowden and omnipresent surveillance cams.The backstory isn't laid out for us at first. We quickly learn that Jackie's husband and child are dead, but not how; she is joylessly hooking up with a married co-worker in his car. Her life is focused on the people she observes through her law enforcement job: she operates a bank of urban CCTV security cameras trained on streets, shops, back lots, and apartment blocks, watching a gritty part of town for crime in real time. They remind me of the set of "Rear Window". She can move the cameras, look at windows or doorways, zoom in, follow someone from place to place. She watches the little dramas of their actual lives.Then, monitoring an encounter in a back lot to see if it is a rape in progress or a trick being turned, she recognizes a man. His name is Clyde. She had thought he was in jail ... we aren't told for what ... but she is told he has gotten out early for good behavior. It shakes her. He lives in the area she can observe, in the Red Road block, a grim high-rise full of people living on the edge. He hangs out in the local pub; he drives a locksmith's van. She watches him. She feels the need to do something. She tracks him, and his associates, first by camera - then in person, into his habitat.It's not clear what she intends. The suspense as she pursues whatever plan she has, if there is a plan and not just impulse, goes close to the edge of what is bearable. We don't know what she is risking. We don't know what sort of man he is. Is he an evil man, who deserves whatever happens to him? Is he planning more crimes, and is she protecting society from him? Is he a decent man, persecuted by a rogue police agent? Is it all more complex? At a certain point there are signs that she may be attracted to him, or is that just adrenaline? Or pretense? Or a response to her shell of isolation and routines falling apart?The film keeps us guessing and mostly avoids thriller clichés, arriving at a resolution that is maybe slightly tinny but mostly satisfying. It's worth some effort to dig this up.

I suppose this might have been given more leeway, were it not for Cache that so perfectly mapped the same space just two years prior; still, there is tremendous power at the heart of this, about the mechanisms of the mind that generate narratives clouting a true world.Alternately, you have the option of watching this for the story of sinister revenge, expressed with the gritty realism of a hostile environment the British know so well. How much you'll get out of it in this way depends on what personal pain you can supply, your own fill of bottled-up hurt that will remain unspoken as you probe around with this woman in search for redemption.This is not the film's power for me though, its proper context is Blowup; there, it was an encounter with an inexplicable image that propelled a feverish effort of the mind to interpret, to attach a narrative around it, that gradually rendered the entire visible world a collection of inexplicable images. Cache masterfully updated this, by feeding from our position behind the camera the inexplicable image to the recipient, himself the source of that image, the facade, in ways that would align the search for that hidden camera filming the stage, a stage that was life, with a search for the true maker that generated the image.Both these were masterful stuff on the formation of illusions, some of the best I know, that everyone should experience at least once. This one unswathes from them.So once more we have a protagonist observing the world from an artificial eye, in fact many worlds at once, each one its own entry into life, it's a brilliant touch that we're given this from a CCTV control room because we're shown how she operates this world from the level of the gods, controlling by merely picking up a telephone, nevertheless it posits a fractured seeing that cannot embrace a unified whole; it is simply not the real thing, though the illusion is potent, cinematic.This is all well until she encounters among the flow of images one that she knows, that wound deeply in the past and is not meant to exist at this point, we can tell this much from her reaction. She is gradually obsessed with solving the mystery posed by this. Of course, being self-absorbed with this image that is her past, she loses focus of the real world that matters. People get hurt as a result of negligence, that she could have prevented by simply looking at the right place.The obsession consumes her so badly, that she literally emerges inside this baffling narrative, that presumably continues from where she left it, in an effort to apprehend the image from up close. Her involvement is carried out by acting a part, this is a clever touch, a part that promises promiscuous sex that grants her entry behind closed doors.But from up close, it is no longer an image. There is escalating danger of us being apprehended inside this seamy underbelly of Glasgow. We are not meant to be exploring what we are, the film works this into a razor-sharp tension that slowly simmers with cheap booze and violent outbursts.It is really powerful material up to this point, but which the filmmaker cannot properly align around the fact that it's an internal vision powering the whole, a pursuit from memory and desire. So we get a predictable denouement that reveals how all the different parts make sense, as though it was the whole point from the start. There is too much that is blunt that we are suddenly tasked to handle emotionally, itself jerking us from our own position as observers. Nonetheless, she preserves a fitting image for the redemptive aftermath; the woman is no longer observing from afar, from behind a screen, but walking down the road. Absolved from the painful processes of self-consciousness, seeing no longer fractured by the past, no longer framed, she can open up to the flow of life and be part of the whole again.

There's a gritty honesty to this film that you don't see very often. Though the script is very spare, and not a lot of information is given to the audience, there is just enough to keep you engaged and wondering what will happen next. And by the end, it all adds up to a satisfying conclusion. It is not exactly a suspense film that will have you on the edge of your seat throughout, but more an interesting study of one woman's obsession and barely controlled grief. You continue to wonder why she is doing what she is doing. There is nary a false moment and not one that will make you groan due to an improbable plot turn, which is the problem with so many thrillers, and films in general these days.Kate Dickie gives an excellent, low-key performance as a private security guard that watches over a panel of monitors linked to cameras placed all throughout Glasgow, Scotland. One day, she sees someone from her past who she did not expect to see, and the story is off and running, or at least trotting. Very well done and well- executed, focusing on a working-class setting we don't see handled well very often.

What starts of as an fascinating mystery/thriller turns around and becomes more of a slow moving drama about grief, loss, revenge, moving on and forgiveness and it was a pretty good one at that but this film is definitely not for everyone. I thought the acting was pretty strong and believable and you felt her pain and struggle of the loss of her husband and her daughter and her odd way with dealing with it and it was just an intriguing but slow journey to find out what really happened that day to them and how she struggles to accept it and move on. This movie really had me guessing and thinking and surprised me in a couple of ways like thinking a certain character is more ruthless than they ended up being and how the mood changes towards the end and ends on a sad but positive note, believe me this is not a full blown thriller. There were some dark, erotic scenes in this film that is not for all tastes and might turn some viewers off so be warned. Overall this was not great but it was an interesting look at life, loss and kind of redemption and it was pretty satisfying, not really what I thought it would be at all but it's worth a look only once though. Don't expect too much from this film or you will be very disappointed, this one requires a lot of patience. More of a 2.5 out of 5 stars.