Ill Manors

A few days in east London. The narrative follows six people and all their paths cross at some point. A dealer loses his phone. A boy finds it. A woman has to give up a baby. Another woman is used to pay off a debt. A young man wants into a gang and is told to do something for it. The narrative proceeds as a chain and a song plays at the start of each section, describing that character's situation. Ben Drew writes and directs; as a musician he is known as Plan B. Riz Ahmed and Ed Skrein are in the cast. It is a British production. The structure is built through music; the songs are not outside the narrative, they work as its narrator. Its ground is the immediate aftermath of the riots in England in 2011 and the film places itself inside that argument. It was shot in real locations on a low budget. The narrative does not defend its characters; the violence is shown and its reasons described, and none of them is cleared. Its hardest section is the strand with the women, and the narrative softens nothing there. Its limit is structure; there are many characters and some strands are not opened enough. Who it is for: viewers who like British street drama and narratives grounded in music. Who it is not for: the violence is very explicit, the register bleak, and some scenes hard to bear.