I just saw this film last night and it was so intense, I actually felt exhausted emotionally at the end of it. To me, that is the mark of a great film! To be honest, the opening scene had me wondering if the film was going to be full of gratuitous sex, but it turns out the sexual scenes were actually crucial to the character development. If you watch carefully, you actually get to fathom the psychological motivations for the three characters who sustain most of the film. Although the climactic scene of sexual aggression at the end of the film became unbearable for me to watch, the film is a cinematic triumph. I was surprised to discover there were no film awards mentioned on the DVD case – it certainly merits one (or two or three)!

“Shank” is a brilliantly well constructed and photographed film. It’s really surprising to see an independent film with production values of this quality. On this basis alone, it deserves four stars.

The idea behind the story is the self-loathing and eventual self-acceptance of the main character, Cal. Cal is a sort of pimply faced, mulatto who hangs out with a Bristol street gang headed by his psychotic ex-girlfriend. He’s secretly in love with beautiful, strong and deeply angry Johnno, who has some rather murky sexual identity issues of his own. Cal satisfies his homosexual urgings by meeting men online and asking them to ‘use’ him. For all his tough-guy pretences in front of his gang, he enjoys being sexually passive, almost to the point of being abused.

Cal’s first encounter in the film is with a schoolteacher he’s met online. After taking him out in the forest for sex, he bends over and allows the teacher to use him, at length. After sex, he hits the teacher in the head, and leaves him stranded and bleeding. But later, when Cal’s friends attack an obviously gay, frail looking French student named Olivier, Cal is drawn to his gazelle-like beauty and grace. Cal is forced to turn against his friends to help Olivier, and when the gang turns on Cal, Cal turns to Olivier for solace. Living with Olivier, building a romantic and sexual relationship with him, Cal begins to realise that his occasional homosexual encounters have not just been one-off sexual urges, and that he truly is Gay. In fact, he falls in love with Olivier.

The story line is at times a bit hard to swallow, but the over-dramatization of some scenes seems intentional. This is a tale of redemption, as we watch Cal change miraculously from Gay Basher to Gay Bashed, finally to Gay Man. It may seem over the top and hokey at times, but it’s a good story, and a nicely done film.