This melodrama set in Yorkshire stars Karen Hassan – a performer with terrific screen presence – as an Irish woman called Alison; she is trapped by her past into working in a brothel with an assortment of other luckless women, some of them trafficked in from abroad. The man who first got her on the game is her own father (Sean McGinley), who she still visits for a line of coke in his seedy trailer every now and again.
One day, shy tech wiz Sam (Aaron Cobham), a man with his own sad backstory, is compelled by a debt owed to the brothel’s vicious owner Max (Neil Bell) to install secret cameras in the rooms so Max and his henchman Barry (Theo Ogundipe) can spy on the workers and clients. Alison and Sam become unlikely friends, bonded over the photographs he takes of her that capture something other than her hardened exterior. Sam and Alison end up going on the run, rocking up in a different part of the country where Alison’s sister Karen (Elva Trill) is raising Alison’s daughter (Izobella Dawson) as her own, while Max rages, chewing chunks of the set’s tatty scenery.
Fortunately for director Keith Farrell, he has cast a pair of solid performers in Hassan and McGinley which balances out the shrill, under-directed performances elsewhere. However accurate the portrait might be of the criminal underbelly of the north of England, any verisimilitude is sacrificed by how thick all the sturm und drang suffering is laid on, and further damaged by the absurd coincidences and cheap sentimentality.
It doesn’t help that the technical aspects are on the shonky side, with some of the actors underlit so that their faces are barely visible (ironic given Sam is meant to be a photographer) – although perhaps that is a clumsy attempt at creating atmosphere. The syrupy score is another annoyance, as is the clumsy editing that drops in flashbacks at random intervals.
• Wait for Me is released on 2 June in UK and Irish cinemas.
