The Plague

Greg Hall’s ultra-low-budget feature debut, The Plague, arrives for a belated theatrical release having taken an unusually circuitous route to the screen. Turned down for funding by the UK Film Council, allegedly for its narrow audience appeal, Hall subsequently shot the film on Mini DV for an independently raised £3,300. Though the result failed to attract a distributor at the initial, woefully attended, industry screening, The Plague found a champion in Mike Leigh, who became instrumental in getting it chosen for the London Film Festival in 2004 and in awarding Hall the first Katrin Cartlidge Award. A distribution deal remained elusive despite further festival interest and The Plague was eventually streamed online, becoming only the second film to receive its commercial premiere on the internet.

Though two years have now elapsed since its first screening in London, The Plague feels irrepressibly fresh, having lost none of its relevance in the interim. Following four friends on an anonymous housing estate in London as they scrape their way through a weekend of transgression, Hall’s film is a zippy and authentic slice of inner-city life. Beginning on a dossy Friday morning as the group convenes to score some cannabis, the film presents black friends Alex (Samuel Anokye), who promises his dealer that they will have his money by 6pm the next day; Tom (David Bonnick Junior), a college boy who is keen on the dealer’s sister, Debs; their white neighbour Matt (Brett Harris), who is hosting the party during which they hope to sell on their stash; and Asian Muslim Ravi (Nur Alam Rabman), who is mixed up with a local fraudster, withdrawing money on friends’ bank cards that are subsequently claimed stolen.

Famed British emcee SkinnyMan appears at sporadic junctures, broadcasting freestyle poetry on pirate radio station Destruction FM and providing a chorus figure to the action by riffing on urban squalor and political oppression. These themes, adumbrated in an opening montage (riots, fast food, George W. Bush, nuclear mushroom clouds, Tony Blair), course through The Plague, but Hall hardly hectors, preferring to emphasise the vibrancy rather than the desperation of the characters’ delinquency. The dynamic between the friends convinces, its pointed multi-racialism never feeling tokenistic, and though the budgetary restraints tell in some of the supporting performances, the four leads are captivating. Tom’s slightly sheepish courtship of Debs, hinging on an ingenuous exchange of text messages, and Ravi’s faltering observation of Ramadan (he is shown guiltily devouring a chocolate bar after a confrontation with some racist skinheads) lend an endearing humanity to their streetwise bravado.

The drama may have a predictable thrust, with the friends’ drug dealing not exactly going as planned, but its momentum is frequently derailed by ambling, larky interludes in which the characters roll joints, discuss records or freestyle rap together. The Plague is as gleeful as a film about four young friends should be, as intent on fun and as sympathetic to banter. A well observed scene in which the four deliver cannabis to a nervy squatter taken to breathing mouthfuls of ignited paraffin at intruders in anticipation of the police is typical of the film’s languorous approach to dialogue: the sequence unfurls lazily ins babble of uncompromising indecipherability. Only in a confused climax at s warehouse party, when the group’s trippy intoxication is interrupted by the arrival of their angered dealer and riot police, does the film’s waywardness become problematic, the ensuing chaos needing greater coherence to satisfy. Otherwise, The Plague is bracing and engaged cinema; it’s hard to imagine what reluctant funders could have considered more vital.

This review features in the November 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.