You might remember writer/director Nicola Collins and her producer sister Teena from Snatch, where they played Mike Reid’s raven-haired, if slightly rubbish, daughters.
But what emerges when they turn the camera on their actual father, Les ‘The Doctor’ Falco, a convicted East London gangster, and his friends is enough to make Guy Ritchie soil his strides.
In a series of unrelenting, black-and-white close-ups, these walnutfaced hatchet men brought up on “bare-knuckle boxing and pigeon shit” relate gob-smacking gangland tales of murders and misdemeanours, cut throats and broken lives.
They’re eloquent, witty and quietly terrifying, the glitchy visuals and chilly score undercutting the laughs with a tremendous sense of foreboding. At one point the image simply switches to black mid-sentence, as if in horror. It’s not hard to see why.
These twinkly, jovial men once ruled ‘The (East) End’ with violence and fear, but you could pass them in the street and never know.
Matt Glasby
