Andrea Arnold's sophomore feature Fish Tank is a wondrous little bubble of a film: with only a handful of characters and locations, you can feel the way Mia's (Katie Jarvis) life is crashing down on her even as it expands.A would-be dancer, she hides out in a empty nearby apartment, drinking and coming up with new routines. She's good -- or at least better than her neighbours --, but you can tell she knows that she might not be good enough to make anything of it. Then her mum (Kierston Waering) brings Connor (Michael Fassbender) home, and it's game over. Mia's just beginning to test the power of her sexuality, and you can actually see Fassbender run Connor through mental calisthenics just to figure out how to deal with her.
Something expected happens, then something unexpected. It doesn't exactly go off the rails; Arnold and Jarvis have a firm grip on Mia throughout. But for a quiet, slow moving film like this one (at least four people walked out of the screening I attended, though that may have been the profanity), it doesn't sit well until the final moments. Maybe when getting out is the point, how you get out doesn't matter. B
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