Sink, 2018.
Written and directed by Mark Gillis.
Starring Martin Herdman, Ian Hogg, Josh Herdman, Tracey Wilkinson, Marlene Sidaway, Mark Gillis and Sadie Shimmin.
SYNOPSIS:
A factory worker is hit with the double whammy of losing his job and being forced to care for his dementia-suffering father when the care home in which he has lived for years is bought out by a big corporation.
A decade after the financial crisis hit the world, it’s fair to say the UK economy is still in a state of recovery. The bite of austerity continues to sink its teeth into the country, with working class people and communities hit particularly hard by the constant drive towards cost-cutting. It’s into this world that Ken Loach fired a deafening salvo with I, Daniel Blake in 2016, and now debutant writer-director Mark Gillis has offered his own take on the story in Sink. It’s a different, less overtly polemical approach to that of Loach, but it’s another powerful take on the issues facing Britain today.
Micky Mason (Martin Herdman) lives in a council bedsit in the shadow of Canary Wharf, positioning the opulence of the city right on his doorstep as a daily reminder of his own predicament. He’s a skilled manual worker, but he has taken on a series of menial jobs on zero hours contracts since the crash. The bedsit becomes all the more crowded when his father (Ian Hogg) is ejected from the private care home in which he has been living as a result of a new company buying out the place. Micky soon loses his job as a result of more cutbacks, leaving him in a desperate situation. It’s at this point that Micky inadvertently falls into the orbit of drug dealers, creating both danger and potential opportunity.
One of the most impressive things about Sink is the detailed and believable milieu that Gillis creates around his characters. Martin Herdman is naturalistic in the extreme and slots entirely naturally into the role of the put-upon skilled worker who is constantly sidelined and told that he will get a call “if anything else turns up”. Gillis creates a community in which the support of neighbours, invariably providing a milky cup of tea, is the most important thing and where a word of help or support from an acquaintance or Jobcentre worker can make all of the difference. This tone is enhanced by elegantly deployed folk songs performed for the film by Oliver Hoare and The Late Great, including ‘Rigs of the Time’ with its bracingly revelant refrain of “honesty’s all out of fashion”.
But Gillis also provides a rich seam of comedy within an environment that easily could have been unyieldingly bleak. Herdman corrects anyone who describes his home as a bedsit by dubbing it a “studio” and there’s a pointed and wry scene in which a Jamie Oliver cookbook is used not for inspiration but to bash a potato cutter into operation. As an evocation of working class life, Gillis gets every aspect spot on.
That’s true until the movie takes its turn into territory more akin to a crime thriller in the third act, swapping the elegantly crafted milieu for something altogether different and not entirely welcome. It doesn’t always ring true within the context of the movie’s very natural social commentary, but there is some very impressive tension eked from a scene of border crossing and Herdman’s performance never dips below the incredibly impressive heights he sets early on. Praise must also go to Hogg, who is terrific as a man gradually seeing his mind slip away, and Sadie Shimmin who appears late on as a kindly middle-aged woman and makes an immediate impact.
Given the undeniable cultural impact of I, Daniel Blake and the sheer force of character provided by its director, the more low-key Sink is not destined to find anything close to that movie’s audience. However, it has valuable things to say about the UK’s current predicament and is anchored by a performance from Martin Herdman that deserves to be seen by far more eyes than it will be.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist and wrestling fan. Follow him on Twitter via @TomJBeasley for movie opinions, wrestling stuff and puns.
