New Town Killers Cinema Review

Director Richard Jobson’s New Town Killers is a high octane hide and seek thriller set in Edinburgh’s new town.

Sean (James Anthony Pearson) lives with his sister Alice (Liz White) in a housing estate but becomes worried when her debt spirals out of control. To get money fast he agrees to a game of cat and mouse for £12,000 in readies, orchestrated by wealthy bankers Alistair and Jamie.

All he needs to do to get the money is not be found by these two for 12 hours. Except the consequences of being found are a tad more severe than a touch on the shoulder followed by “TAG”! The clue is in the title.

The cloying paranoia builds as Sean realises the deadly consequences of being found, and he begins to wonder who else is in on this game. A few unexplained and unbelievable events along the way had me a bit confused too, but the action kept on coming and I soon forgot about these.

What follows are lots of close-ups of Sean looking worried and out of breath, running through tunnels and attempting magnificent building leaps. Run Sean run. The relentless pace is broken only by the focus switching from Sean running to the killers debating among themselves.

Dougray Scott brilliantly masters the brooding menace of psychopath Alistair, who gets his kicks luring the less well off with much needed cash for the chance to execute them as if they were a lesser known species of impudent gnat. He is hell-bent on performing a type of socio-economic cleansing which he undertakes with sickening violence and glee.

He does all of this because ‘he can’; a bit of a hackneyed but nonetheless relevant message. But no matter how compelling a point it is to make, there is no getting away from the fact that the rampaging Alistair is clearly psychopathic and therefore not a reliable peg to hang social comment on.

Sean’s ingenuity gives him a head start, but for how long? New Town Killers will keep you guessing all the way; will the mouse really outwit the fat cat?

Out in UK cinemas from 12th June 2009.