Eight years ago in The Magdalene Sisters, his second movie as writer-director, Peter Mullan took up the cudgels against the repressive cruelty of a Catholic institution for girls in the Ireland of the 1960s.
He has now turned to, and on, a similar subject on the other side of the Irish Sea, the insensitive brutality of a Catholic boys' school in Glasgow and the conditions that lead to the near-destruction of an intelligent, lively, working-class lad.
What with the idle, negligent teachers, a brutal, alcoholic father (Peter Mullan), a cowed mother and a violent, antisocial brother, it's not entirely surprising that John McGill (Conor McCarron) throws in his lot with local gangs for reasons of personal survival and self-respect, and ends up among the eponymous acronymous Neds (ie non-educated delinquents).
This angry film is a forceful slice of life, clearly indebted to the realism of Ken Loach, in whose My Name Is Joe Mullan starred, and to whose Kes it nods. One also detects something of Terence Davies's films about growing up in working-class, Catholic Liverpool. Mullan's performance recalls the drunken domestic tyrant played by Pete Postlethwaite in Distant Voices, Still Lives.
The realism is disrupted by the occasional touch of surrealism, most especially a sequence in which a statue of Christ comes to life for the hallucinating hero, a recurrent trope of Catholic movies.
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