Treacle Jr – review

There must be a children's joke that goes: Q. "How do you approach a film called Treacle?" A. "Syruptitiously." Anyway this low-budget British movie centres on the brief odd-couple relationship between a middle-class dropout who leaves his wife and young child in a Birmingham suburb and lights out to live rough in south London, where he takes up with a manic, motor-mouthed, mentally disturbed Irish tramp. The latter lives with an abusive, promiscuous, exploitative black girl and scrapes a living by, among other things, attempting to hire out his cat Treacle to kill mice in greasy-spoon cafes. The film has its moments and Aidan Gillen is impressive as the Hibernian hanger-on from hell, but it's a slight affair. Back in 2000, Gillen starred in Thraves's highly promising The Low Down, a portrait of the drifting, directionless lives of a group of young people, once art school contemporaries, in north London. It too had an authentic feel to it, as I recall.