Pure doom and gloom

Paul, a 10-year-old east London estate kid, prepares his mum's breakfast... takes the spoon, cooks the heroin, charges the syringe and carries it all in to her on a tray. Her "medicine", he innocently calls it. The child's ignorance - "What's a junkie?" he has to ask - about the role that drugs play in the ailing, acned, depressed and wasting life of his widowed mum (Molly Parker) is the only implausibility in a performance that is the main reason for seeing Gillies MacKinnon's new film.

The Scottish director of Hideous Kinky and Small Faces, films that analysed intuitively the parent-child relationship, lets himself be overwhelmed here by an excess of miserabilism and stock characters out of the social worker's case file and the policeman's charge sheet.

His salvation is young Harry Eden; as Paul, this child actor carries the story and the lesson it teaches him - that surviving means managing your own destiny. The trouble is, for much of the time he has to cope with an overload of other people's vices in a film that lays on the gloom and doom relentlessly.

Like a TV play that hasn't enough time to say all it wants, it fills every minute with distress signals, disastrous events and impending demise: someone going "cold turkey", someone else fatally OD-ing, an unwanted baby being dumped on a stranger, a flashy pimp beating up his woman, a pregnant waitress going on the game ...

Ken Loach would have called in the social workers and made more of them - here they are unbelievably ineffectual twits. Mike Leigh would have found some boon or blessing in the bloody place. MacKinnon's dour commitment is never in doubt: what is, is his judgment of how much we can stand.

These are all problem people, but they bring on compassion fatigue. The feelgood conclusion he tags on - if going to see West Ham United can ever be called "upbeat" - just isn't earned by the oversimplified resolution of the family's troubles.

Not so much an ending, more a facile exit.

Pure
Cert: cert18