Maelstrom leaves you feeling Raw

The second part of Chris O'Connell's urban trilogy hits the ground running with a mesmerisingly awful scene - a girl gang beating a man unconscious in a subway train to a deafening soundtrack of dance music and screeching train wheels.

The three girls - and their male companion - are graffiti muggers: spraying paint in the faces of their victims before robbing them. But these are not cool, swaggering gangsters; they are damaged, often pathetic individuals who rely on bizarre rituals to get them through. Their unit starts unravelling when their leader, Lex, loses the plot, turning on those around her.

Jo Joyner as Lex is a terrifying vision of dysfunctional youth, and Samantha Power and Clare Corbett as fellow gang members Trainers and Lorna are also convincingly screwed up - but the former character's shrill tones and pronounced stutter and the latter's impenetrable Bristolian accent make listening to them hard going at times.

The power of the piece is diluted, though, by the ambiguous character of Rueben (Gary Cargill). Is he genuinely someone from the right side of the tracks who gets sucked into the girls'violent world, or does he lie from the start to find a way into their lives? Although he acts as a conduit for the girls'explanations of how they've ended up in this state, ultimately the maelstrom going on in the rest of the piece swamps his own role and leaves him as something of an intrusion in the visceral thrust of the storyline.

RAW