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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Peter Bradshaw

Animol review – gritty young offenders drama challenges conventional machismo

Tut Nyuot  as Troy, in Ashley Walters’ Animol.
Tut Nyuot as Troy, in Ashley Walters’ Animol. Photograph: Ed Norton Photography/© Anthony Dickenson

The lawless brutality of a young offender institution is the setting for this British movie written by Marching Powder’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realise they can survive only by abandoning their innocence and decency, and submitting to the gang authority of a psycho top G, naturally involving a horrible loyalty test.

This is a place where drugs arrive by drone, where facially tattooed men meet each other’s gaze with a cool opaque challenge in the canteen, and where the cues and balls on the recreation area’s pool table have only one purpose: to give someone a three-month stay in the hospital wing while underpaid guards in lanyards and ill-fitting v-neck jumpers look the other way.

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