A gang of small-town drug dealing gym rats are set upon by a murderous stranger in this satisfying Welsh genre piece.
There are worse films to be obsessed with than Shane Meadows‘ Dead Man’s Shoes, and that film’s blood-flecked paw prints are all over writer/director Tony Burke’s witty, Welsh revenge yarn, Protein. The film cheekily adopts its title from the supposed nutritional qualities of human flesh among the more desperate echelons of the body building community, as our hooded, monosyllabic protagonist, Sion (Craig Russell), is in town to take out some tinpot trash and then feast on their freshly carved entrails.
On the sidelines is kindly gym worker Katrina (Kezia Burrows) who attempts to befriend the shell-shocked Sion, and while he very much remains a closed book emotionally, he does offer her a secret assist by butchering a chauvinist local lout who’s giving her grief. In fact, the horror/slasher element of the film is perhaps the least interesting thing about it, as Burke builds up an ensemble of characters who are all more than mere functional bit-players serving a hackneyed plot.
For example, two drug-dealing goons who work for a smarmy local kingpin are secret lovers who have been forced to conceal their relationship due to the air of unreconstructed machismo that pervades their grubby little community. Similarly, the two cops investigating this rash of disappearances come freighted with their own traumas, and an initially frosty relationship eventually thaws into something that’s rather toughing for a film that, in the main, focuses on violence, bigotry, exploitation, humiliation and which household tools are best for administering pain to your fellow man.
The link to Dead Man’s Shoes doesn’t begin and end with its angular loner with zero moral scruples when it comes to offing his targets. Burke injects a much-needed hit of parochial humour into proceedings, exemplified by Steve Meo’s hilarious, hapless Kevin, a wannabe wideboy who loves nothing more than to play dress-up Travis Bickle in his bedroom and have yelled arguments with his (always off-camera) mother.
There’re no wheels being reinvented here in terms of tone or narrative, but it is a very solid genre runaround that is elevated by its occasional and welcome lapses into soulful introversion. It’s highly satisfying to see a filmmaker transition from a career making music videos and shorts to a work which expends time and effort to flesh-out all of its characters – even if that flesh might be eventually eaten by its cannibalistically-inclined antihero.