Duane Hopkins' sophomore feature is a technically skilled but stylistically overwrought slab of British urban miserablism.

Characterization is the principal element left on the roadside in “Bypass,” an artsy slab of British urban miserablism that remains oddly unmoving despite its surfeit of onscreen suffering. Frustratingly echoing the promise of writer-director Duane Hopkins’ 2008 debut, “Better Things,” without building on it, this technically adroit but stylistically overwrought film casts rising star George MacKay as a put-upon teen whose overwhelming familial responsibilities in the wake of his mother’s death steer him toward a life of crime. Yet the pic’s human drama and class commentary are frequently obscured behind a morass of lens flares and slow-motion imagery, which don’t make Hopkins’ chosen gangland milieu any less familiar. Commercial auds are likely to heed the advice of the title, though further festival slots await. 

U.K. cinema is presently rearing a strain of hard-edged arthouse crime thriller that continues to prosper at international festivals without finding much of an audience at home: Often too grimy or brutal for the specialty market, they’re nonetheless too deliberate or esoteric to pass with the Danny Dyer-favoring genre crowd. Finer films than “Bypass” have fallen between these stools, and Hopkins’ team will be counting on the growing profile of the charismatic, robustly good-looking MacKay to help them net distributor interest. Still, the film is far from a star vehicle: MacKay, like the other members of the film’s strong ensemble, is a mere component in the director’s overall tapestry of highly aestheticized unhappiness. “Better Things,” with its nods to the standard-bearers of British social realism via the formal rigor of Bruno Dumont, was arguably the more austere work, but also a less distancing one.

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Though filmed in and around the Northern town of Gateshead, “Bypass” isn’t heavy on environmental specifics. Hopkins’ intent is to convey the decayed sense of social identity and economic standing across England’s de-industrialized satellite towns, collectively visualized here as an airless network of unyielding concrete and snaking motorways to nowhere in particular. Living in a place that has so little sense of self, young Tim (McKay) has essentially followed suit; nonetheless, with his father absent and his mother bedridden, he’s pushed into premature adulthood when his older brother Greg (Benjamin Dilloway) is sentenced to 18 months in prison for burglary.

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One year later, Mom has passed away (of what, we’re never informed), Greg has been paroled and Tim has taken his lead into the underworld, selling stolen goods in the hope of generating enough income to keep social services away from him and his surly, school-skipping younger sister Helen (Lara Peake). Just as his devoted g.f., Lilly (Charlotte Spencer, warmly ingenuous), makes an unwelcome pregnancy announcement, Tim begins to experience ominous symptoms — headaches, skin rashes, vomiting — of a potentially fatal illness. (Again, it’s an unspecified one, leaving the viewer to forge a possible connection to his mother’s death.) With enough woes already on his plate to fill several novels written by Sapphire, Tim must also manage the spiralling chaos of his criminal activity.

This is territory as heavily trodden as it is simply heavy, but that’s not to say it can’t elicit from-the-gut feeling if observed with enough compassion and acuity. Hopkins’ script, however, never gets under the increasingly welted skin of its relentlessly victimized protagonist. Riddled with standard-issue expletives, it presents Tim’s hellish existence without the sporadic glimmers of curiosity, humor or release afforded by real life even at its darkest hours, while also neglecting essential particulars of his personality or circumstances that could bring the character into relief. (Does he himself listen to the swarming, stately electronica and insertions of dubstep that pervade the soundtrack, or is that just the director’s mood-driven preference? Such details matter.) MacKay plays Tim with fine, committed stoicism, but there’s no inner life for the actor to animate; needless to say, the same goes for the film’s subsidiary players. The final impression is one of commendably strenuous human-interest storytelling without much humanity to fuel it.

Matters aren’t helped by Hopkins’ and skilled d.p. David Procter’s decision to shoot proceedings in the sleek, heightened style one might associate more with luxury car advertising, as colliding light sources sometimes bleach the frame into near-inscrutability. A motivation of sorts for this affectation comes when Tim admits to a doctor that he has a negative reaction to bright lights, though the film’s crystallized visual texture and often painstakingly asymmetrical framing still feel divorced from the character’s perspective.

Chris Barrett’s splintered editing is similarly artful but overworked, while the helmer’s excessive reliance on slow-mo at moments of key revelation or devastation smacks of pomposity. Hopkins remains a director to watch, and “Bypass” doesn’t want for startling technique or vivid standalone images, but rarely do these virtues line up with the emotional response the film is chasing from scene to scene — as drama goes, it’s a kitchen sink exquisitely coated in mirrorball shards.

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Venice Film Review: ‘Bypass’

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Horizons), Sept. 1, 2013. Running time: 105 MIN.

  • Production: (U.K.-Sweden) A British Film Institute, Film Agency Wales, Film i Vast presentation of a Third Films production in association with Plattform Production, Severn Screen, the Match Factory, Torino Film Labs. (International sales: the Match Factory, Cologne, Germany.) Produced by Samm Haillay. Executive producers, Keith Griffiths, Christopher Collins, Keith Potter, Ed Talfan. Co-producers, Erik Hemmendorff, Kate Crowther, Jessica Ask, Andrew McVicar.
  • Crew: Directed, written by Duane Hopkins. Camera (color, HD), David Procter; editor, Chris Barwell; music, Saunder Jurriaans, Danny Bensi; production designer, Stephane Collonge; art director, Mike McLaughlin, Lisa O'Grady; costume designer, Gill Horn; sound, Jesper Miller; supervising sound editor, Joakim Sundstrom; re-recording mixer, Per Bostrom; visual effects, Mediatrek Post; stunt coordinator, Curtis Rivers; line producer, Jack Tarling; assistant director, Karl Hall; second unit director, Andrew McVicar; second unit camera, Damien Pawle; casting, Kharmel Cochrane.
  • With: George MacKay, Benjamin Dilloway, Charlotte Spencer, Matt Cross, Anton Saunders, Lara Peake, Chanel Cresswell, Donald Sumpter, Arabella Arnott, Adam Astill. (English dialogue)

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