‘It’s basic detective work,” says veteran smalltown cop Stanton (Charles Dale), trying to justify pressurising a lead about her love life. “Very fucking basic,” says Patch (Andrea Hall), a London colleague who has come to the sticks because of a possible connection with a grisly serial killer. That’s the narky style of this ramshackle but moreish Welsh thriller, which takes place in the coke-sniffing milieu of endemic poverty and petty criminality, under ubiquitous sallow street lighting, in which everyone’s looking for an out.
Patch is right about the serial killer: drifter Sion (Craig Russell) has pitched up in town and blags a cleaning job at a local gym. A traumatised ex-squaddie with an inferiority complex, he takes offence at the group of hoodlums lording it over the machines. So he hammers in the skull of bouncer Dwayne (Kai Owen) and stores some choice morsels in a freezer; an extra protein source for his iron-pumping. But Sion is oblivious to Dwayne having recently cut in on a drug deal with rival Albanian gangsters – so his seemingly brutal murder threatens to kick off a turf war.
