The landscape of the Yorkshire Moors looks wild and ominous in this macabre, nihilist debut by music-video director Daniel Wolfe. It’s the ideal hiding place for a teenager on the run, but also a more than suitable hunting ground for her family, who are eager to commit an honour killing. Together with her boyfriend Aaron, Laila (17 and of Pakistani origin) lives in a sad caravan park just outside Sheffield. There she thinks she is safe from her conservative family, but in the meantime her brother Zaheer is combing the area with five armed sidekicks. It doesn’t take long for them to find her, after which a nerve-wracking pursuit through deserted streets and spooky marshes ensues. The beautiful dark images in which Wolfe captures this mixture of classic British social-realist drama and exciting genre cinema, poetic and oppressive at the same time, was shot on 35mm by Robbie Ryan, the regular cameraman for Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights).
