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Cast: Kate Dickie, Tony Curran
Directed by: Andrea Arnold

In Milan Kundera’s book, ‘Immortality’, the character Agnes muses, “Even when I was a child, adults would ask me: little girl, may we take your picture? And then one day they stopped asking. The right of the camera was elevated above all other rights and that changed everything”. Today we are ‘watched’ almost everywhere, all the time, mostly by the ubiquitous CCTV cameras…in the name of our own security. We don’t even notice it most of the time.

As this movie opens we see Jackie (Kate Dickie) sitting in a survellaince control room, in front of a huge panel of screens. It’s her job to look at the grainy, soundless images for any signs of an imminent crime and get help to the place, before it’s called for. She has some of the seediest areas of Glasgow on her watch. She looks out for some of the regulars, a guy taking out his sick bulldog for a walk, a female janitor dancing away her concerns while cleaning in an office building.

She doesn’t seem to mind the solitude and tedium of the job. In fact she doesn’t appear to have any personal life of her own and this is the way she prefers to be in touch with the rest of humanity.

Her face has an unconventional beauty, but she has chosen to suppress it behind a blank yet intense mask. She has been wounded…we don’t know how. There’s hurt in her eyes, which cuts so deep that it appears to have gone past the stage of pain. All warmth seems to have been drained out of her psyche.

The rhythm of her mechanically prodding life is jolted one day when she sees a face on one of the screens. She shifts around the controls, trying to bring the face into focus. It’s someone she knows and had hoped she would never have to see again. She goes back home and takes out some paper clippings of a trial. We find out that the man was in prison and has just been released.

Now, Jackie starts slipping on her duties. A kid is hurt because of her negligence. But she is immersed in her obsession now. She starts following the guy around like a ghost. She crashes into one of his parties at a rundown apartment. The guy is a roguish, streetsmart type. He is charming with women. But Jackie wants something…she is moving towards it in small steps…is it vengeance….but for what?

The movie’s climax is suitably catahrtic for the principal characters…who manage to attain some sort of a closure.

The camera in ‘Red Road’ shows us what it sees. But it’s almost as if the camera itself is not sure if what it sees among the dark, cold yet sensual images is real or not. It just looks, it never reveals.

One of the themes of this movie is the intimacy of voyeurism. At the same time it is a keen portayal of a bruised soul, which will haunt your memory for a long time to come.

(P.S.- This is the first part of the ‘Advance Party’ concept of Lars Von Trier. There are going to be two more movies, set in the same city, Glasgow, with the same characters. If this is anything to go by, those two should be worth the wait.)