Despite trumpeting itself as the new movie from the makers of '99 Brit-smash Human Traffic, South West Nine is a clubber's flick of a very different chemical make-up. While its predecessor was a freewheeling comedy, Fruit Salad Films' latest is a far darker affair, involving a group of Brixton-based strangers whose paths cross when they're drawn together by a mysterious CD-ROM, a brain-rearranging dose of LSD, a bag of pills and a loaded gun.
Writer/director Richard Parry's background in war-zone camerawork no doubt has much to do with both this grittier tone and the movie's in-yer-face anti-capitalist sentiment. But while his script is weak, suffering from an annoyingly intrusive voiceover, his flair for visuals is impressive.
From the opening London zoom-in, to a drug's eye view of acid travelling through the bloodstream towards the brain, Parry offers plenty of reasons to keep your eyes stuck to the screen. A patchy debut, then, but one marking him out as a helmer to watch.
