Edinburgh 2010: Cherry Tree Lane

Cherry Tree Lane is an interesting third feature from Paul Andrew Williams and yet another departure after The Cottage (a violent black comedy I still haven't seen). Williams is an interesting British filmmaker and, in person, not at all how you might expect him to be, both in terms of his personality and his tastes. For instance, don't read too much into his story credit for British horror flick The Children: he's not a frustrated genre director, and London To Brighton wasn't a Trojan horse project to get him started. I don't think we'll know for a few years yet what kind of a director he really is, and I think he probably feels the same way, so the best thing is to approach Cherry Tree Lane as an intense, very slyly comic thriller from someone who's experimenting with forms and ideas. The reaction in Edinburgh has been mixed, but I was pleased to see that for every outright shitty review there seemed to be two or three that at least figured out what the movie does well.

I went on set of the film when it was being made last autumn, almost at the end of its production schedule. All I saw being shot was a scene in which a middle-aged couple ate their dinner, and I wondered how far into the action we were. Seeing the film, I was surprised to find that this is the opening scene of the movie, and pretty much all there is in terms of setting the scene. Basically, it's early evening and an ordinary, suburban husband and wife have their mealtime interrupted by a gang of surly youths who make them prisoner in their own home while waiting for the couple's son to come home. The boy's offence is not made immediately clear, but it's pretty obvious that the family at 18 Cherry Tree Lane – also home, in a parallel world, to the family visited by a certain fictional Ms Poppins – are in big trouble.

Several things will conspire to make this a tough watch, most notably the violence. While it doesn't count as torture porn, and neither are the assaults especially graphic, there's a chilling edge to these scenes that will certainly upset what the BBC used to call 'people of a sensitive disposition'. Then there's the pacing. Instead of the usual three-act structure – which was very solidly employed in London To Brighton – Cherry Tree Lane has a fleeting first act, a long second act and a medium-length third act, which, coupled with the film's 78-minute running time, means that a lot of people will be thrown on the streets feeling extra disorientated by the mill they've just been put through.

But in terms of what's actually in there, Cherry Tree Lane has quite a lot to offer. Obviously, it's about the sheer stupidity and mindlessness of youth crime these days, but it's not strictly about desensitisation – it's more about human nature than nurture. It's been compared to Michael Haneke's Funny Games, but it's not about the viewer's relationship to violence as entertainment. Personally, I think it's got more in common with A Clockwork Orange, book and film, which explored violence with relation to youth, pivoting on the way adolescents tend to act without fear of consequence. There's a dryly funny mundanity here that's not in Haneke's film at all, and this is evident in the best scenes in the film; in one, the ringleader roots through their DVDs, baffled by their arty taste, in another, he calls his girlfriend over to watch telly while they wait (she brings her little brother!).

These details, rich with black humour, are why I vastly preferred it to Eden Lake: Cherry Tree Lane is much more subtle. Which is also why, although I confess to not fully buying the structure, I loved the film's final image. I won't spoil it, but Cherry Tree Lane ends with an unsettling cliffhanger that just about sums up the movie. Bloody kids...