Can you trust your work colleagues? Perhaps not when they’re all hardened criminals and there’s a lot of money at stake. A quartet of robbers fresh from a heist hole up in a remote Dartmoor cottage in a grimy crime drama from music-video director Barnaby Roper, turning his hand successfully to feature films here.
The gang’s leader is Ronnie, played by Eddie Marsan, who unlike the others gets a voiceover, too, giving us a window into this veteran geezer’s thought processes. Marsan serves up the world-weary grit demanded by the character with aplomb; he can do this stuff in his sleep. More of a revelation is Sam Claflin, having an enormous amount of fun as a proper wildcard, the kind of loose cannon whose impulsive nature guarantees trouble. Claflin is more usually cast as a gentleman or dashing handsome hero and has played a posh version of this sort of character before, in The Riot Club; but he’s relishing the chance to work a rougher patch here.
Torchwood’s Burn Gorman meanwhile turns in a splendidly oily performance as the accountant of the crew, while relative newcomer Tienne Simon in a quieter role gets a little lost by comparison. Perhaps Simon’s part is a shade underwritten in comparison to the others, but it doesn’t help that everyone is dialling it up to 11 as if they are trying to reach the back row of the main stage at the National Theatre. Indeed, much of the film unfolds like a kind of low-rent Harold Pinter play. Crime doesn’t pay, they say, and this low-key compelling chamber piece emphatically agrees.