The British prison movie genre, like its wayward cousin on the outside, the British gangster genre, is more sparsely populated than you’d think. The (un) holy trinity of McVicar, A Sense of Freedom, and Scum have done their 45-year stretch relatively unmolested, with Hunger, Starred Up and The Escapist the only infamous new inmates with any previous form.
There is an unwavering brutality that saturates all of films mentioned above, a vengeful Victorian kaleidoscope of shit, piss, blood, spit, and cum, that never ceases to horrify the audience at the sheer level degradation experienced by those banged up in overcrowded conditions. The catastrophe of claustrophobia in the prison system has been rich pickings for the social realism of directors like Alan Clarke and Steve McQueen; their critique of incarceration and its architects is as direct and damning as ever.
However, those old cinematic lags have recently began to feel outdated as Prison-Tok footage of shocking violent attacks, rampant drug use, and sex acts with female prison guards are posted regularly on social media platforms.
Wasteman, directed by Cal McMau and starring David Jonsson and Tom Blyth, pulls the pin on these phenomena, tosses the grenade, and slams the cell door shut waiting for the explosion to rip through the establishment.
Jonsson plays drug dealer Taylor, who is serving 13 years for manslaughter when a schoolboy overdosed on the pills he was serving up. Taylor is the Dickensian underclass writ large, an emotionally stunted man-child, not much more than a child himself when he was sentenced. Taylor is Droopy in human form, the mere act of putting his hand in his pocket or scratching his head is heartbreaking, tragic, and ultimately pathetic, truly the titular Wasteman of the film.
Taylor is hooked on synthetic heroin, his time done in an opioid daze, serving food to the other inmates and cutting the hair of the wing’s dealers, Paul and Gaz. Out of the blue, Taylor qualifies for an early release scheme, a symptom of Britain’s crumbling prison system.
Institutionalised and alone, Taylor orbits his very British purgatory like a slowly disintegrating Soviet satellite, decrepit and obsolete.
The great polymath Peter Ustinov quipped, “It’s the hope that kills you” and Wasteman uses Taylor’s imminent release as viciously as a toothbrush shiv during association. Enter Tom Blyth’s nuclear-powered Dee, Taylor’s psychotic new cellmate. Like Taylor he’s a product of austerity, joint enterprise, and social media. Unlike Taylor, who internalised his grief and rage, Dee projects it like bolts of lighting cast from Zeus himself, obliterating any hope with the constant dread of violence.
Dee steps straight into the top echelon of movie villains, wearing his neck tattoo like a roll neck, glassy eyed, dominating the space, eloquent in his use of Multicultural London English, charming and chilling in equal measure, economical with his threats when explaining the best way to kill a rival, “Eyes, throat, liver. Stick it in and give it a twist.”
Yet when asked by Taylor if he has anyone on the outside, Dee looks to the sky in obvious pain only to be met with the cold monotony of his cell’s ceiling. This is the fuel that burns within Tom when fighting with heavily armed riot wardens, his face smeared like a Francis Bacon painting through their shields, taking a beating from other prisoners or proudly displaying his prison wealth, conspicuous consumption in the form of stacked bottles of Oasis and Air Jordans, worth millions if Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst arranged them.
Wasteman offers no easy answers about how to tackle Britain’s escalating prison crisis and acts as a stark reminder that if you treat people inhumanely then they’ll behave inhumanely.
Despite the brutality, Wasteman’s characters are well written and nuanced, many of the cast having been ex-prisoners themselves.
No one watching Wasteman will be under any illusion that prison is a soft touch, and we should be reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s view back in 1922, “Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.”