I saw Andrea Arnold's first film "Red Road" at TIFF a few years back and was struck by how well she evoked the lives of people living difficult lives in the Scottish "projects".
To some extent, "Fish Tank" revisits the same milieu, but the story is entirely its own.
A young teenager (an intense performance by Katie Jarvis) deals with the pressures of her own life, which include contending with conflict with her mother and her younger sister. Things take a turn for the worse when her mother's new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) appears on the scene.
Arnold's work has been compared to Ken Loach's work. There are parallels -- they both have a gift for depicting the lives of a British under class, but Arnold's work makes its political points implicitly, without the polemicism that sometimes derails Loach's best intentions. She also has a terrific way with actors and a facility with imagery that's comparable to Lynne Ramsay's work on "Ratcatcher" and "Morvern Callar".
It's not an easy film to watch (particularly in the last third of the film), but it was very compelling.
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