Loose End

• Directed By: Damian Morter
• Written By: Damian Morter and Anthony Morter
• Country: UK
• Released: 2009
• Running Time: 45 minutes
• Links: Official Site
• Crime, Reviews, Thriller

Damian Morter’s directorial début is a straightforward tale of a double-cross gone wrong and an angry gangster looking for revenge. This may not be the most original premise ever devised, but it is handled with a confidence and assurance that results in a very effective, and remarkably atmospheric, crime thriller.

Loren (Reena Lalbihari) pushes Micheal (Chris Bowe) to contact a gangland contact of his, Johnny (Scott Livingstone) and dangle the prospect of a very large drug deal in front of him. Johnny bites and turns up at the agreed time and place with Jack (Damian Morter), his saner colleague. Here, they meet Micheal, who is acting on behalf of an unnamed client, in order to conclude the deal. Inevitably enough, things go wrong and shots are fired by someone unseen. Both Johnny and Jack are left for dead by Micheal who flees the scene.

Jack, however, survives. It takes six months for his wounds to heal, but once this time has passed, he sets out to track down those that deceived him, to recover his property and to extract some very brutal revenge.

There is more to the set-up than the above synopsis suggests and the film does take quite a while to introduce the various characters and indicate their relationships to each other. At the time, this felt a bit slow but once things started moving this proved to be time well spent. Not only were the characters well defined and easy to both believe in and care about, but they also proved to have been introduced in a manner that allowed for some very plausible twists to be introduced into the plot.

It is these twists that moved the film beyond being a simple revenge flick into being something smarter, more engaging and much more enjoyable. Much thought has clearly been put into both the characters and the various plot elements and these have been well slotted together in a manner that does prove to be very satisfying.

The film is helped immensely by the strength of Damian Morter’s performance. Wronged, angry and looking for revenge, Jack is also a character that never loses sight of the bottom line. It’s a difficult balance to strike but one that Morter manages with bone-crunching aplomb. Chris Bowe also deserves a mention here for his performance as Micheal, a character who knows that he is way out of his depth, can see that things will end badly but is too weak to call a halt to the disaster of his own making.

Also worth mentioning is the soundtrack. The original music for this film is credited to Russ Diapper, who we have encountered on this site several times previously and, on those occasions, I believe I have mentioned that Diapper does have a very good ear for sound design and a strong sense of atmosphere. In this film, Damian Morter has made very effective use of this to build a film imbued with a genuinely menacing ambience.

While the film does have some limitations, it is a very strong first film and one that marks out Damian Morter as someone to watch out for. If he builds on the strengths demonstrated here, we can look forward to some very powerful films in the near future.

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