MUSCLE – It’s not quite ‘Shane Meadows does Fight Club’, but there’s a little bit of that in it. Cavan Clerkin plays Simon, an ordinary bloke who’s stressed by his job and ailing relationship, setting him up on a quest for meaning that he believes will start when he joins the local gym. Instead of truth, what he finds there is personal-trainer-cum-psychopath Craig Fairbrass, who inveigles his way into Simon‘s home and transforms it into a drugs hangout host to what must surely be UK cinema’s grimmest orgy. ‘Muscle’ is bleak. This is due in no small part to the monochrome photography, which frames North East UK’s post-industrial wilderness so vividly that you can almost feel the rain on your face as you stare in mourning at the outskirts of Sunderland. Soundtrack electronics, lush but funereal, cement the downer mood. There’s a real sense of claustrophobia, of entrapment, engulfment – Simon is drowning at the mercy of a steroid psycho and his court of violent jesters, slipping further when he’s groomed as a drug mule. True to the received form of movies about desperate guys under pressure, he can only be squeezed so much before action seems inevitable, even if ‘action’ in this case amounts to looking moody in a van and making a few phone calls. ‘Muscle’ tends increasingly to nightmare as it draws to its close. I didn’t like the resolution at first, but it grew on me, loose ends giving way to a haze of dreamy darkness. Let’s just hope they’re happy with shitting on his table and leaving it at that.
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