TRESPASS AGAINST US: A Clichéd Countryside Crime Drama

Generic crime narratives can be made to feel revolutionary by simply changing the setting of the story – it’s a tried and tested step that can help make familiar stories and characters feel refreshing despite any familiarity. Trespass Against Us tells an often repeated tale, which is still depicted in a variety of different ways despite having already been established as a well worn cliché – the criminal who wants to quit the “family business” in order to start a new life and to protect his own children from making the same mistakes he did.

Breathing life into cliche

Instead of the urban locales of the world’s major cities where these stories nominally take place, Trespass Against Us relocates to the sleepy Gloucestershire countryside. This South Westerly English county is most familiar to international film viewers as the setting for the fictitious village in Hot Fuzz, both a spoof of well worn movie clichés and a gentle poke at the mundanity of life in a close knit community.

This sheer geographical coincidence does go deeper than that – whereas Edgar Wright’s comedy unleashes the ridiculousness of cinematic clichés by portraying them in such an unassuming location, Trespass Against Us merely shows that some clichés are too tired to be invigorated by a setting and a way of life audiences rarely get to see depicted onscreen.

Prolific TV, commercial and music video director Adam Smith’s feature debut doesn’t even feel particularly fresh from an artistic perspective either. Smith seems like a capable pair of hands behind the camera, but he fails to do anything exciting to elevate the fairly generic material he’s been given to work with.

Michael Fassbender stars as Chad Cutler, a career criminal who is living in a makeshift caravan park in the countryside along with his domineering father Colby (Brendan Gleeson), as well as his wife, young children and some other characters with sketchy backgrounds. He makes a living for his family by partaking in elaborately staged thefts, which in a narrative point I have to say feels entirely nonsensical; the police are aware he and his associates are responsible, yet he has never been charged with a criminal offence in his life.

After a high profile theft makes national news, the police (led by Rory Kinnear) close in on Colby and his family, as their inter-family relationships threaten to deteriorate, and the prospect of living a “normal life” becomes increasingly impossible. Trespass Against Us has gone severely under-hyped in every country it has been released so far, despite the pedigree in front of the camera – upon watching, it isn’t difficult to see why.

An Inauthentic Character Study

Here, Fassbender and Gleeson take momentary lapses from being two of the most reliable screen presences in contemporary cinema in order to play stock archetypes, both attempting West country accents, but instead adopting a tone that sounds like it is native to everywhere from Ireland to the Midlands. It is the rare English language movie that would have benefitted from subtitles, as both actors fail to nail their accents to the point that the dialogue is maddeningly incoherent to listen to – I never became acclimatised even as the awkward accents became familiar.

The screenplay calls for Fassbender to repeatedly use slang terms associated with the region, such as affectionately calling people “mush”, which always manages to sound like an alien trying to speak English for the first time no matter how frequent these words are tossed around. It is an underdeveloped performance, arguably the first in Fassbender’s career – and for an actor who always manages to disappear into his characters to the point they were fully believable, here he just looks like Michael Fassbender failing at performing the accent he’s trying to pull off.

Gleeson doesn’t fair much better, as his character is saddled with a stereotypical “conflict of faith” narrative so prevalent in gangster movies. He is a creationist Christian who believes the world is flat and waxes lyrical about his denial of evolution (one monologue on this subject gives the film its title, somewhat inexplicably) – although thanks to sloppy writing, his confused relationship with faith is never explored, with his approach to Christianity looking utterly cartoonish. Gleeson’s entire performance feels like an atheist’s parody of what a religious person looks like.

The film has been so devoid of hype, that news outlets have failed to acknowledge the similarities between the story in this film and that of British crime family the Johnsons, dubbed the “Godfathers of the Cheltenham underworld”, before their 2008 imprisonment. Although the creators of this film have outwardly stated it isn’t autobiographical, it does appear to have taken this case in particular as a source of inspiration – the Johnson’s rode around in 4×4’s, stole from stately homes in the West Country and lived in a makeshift caravan park to evade capture, despite their wealth. Fassbender’s character also appears to be based specifically on the Johnson’s ringleader, whose middle name was Chad, who shared the same illiteracy that Fassbender’s character struggles with in the film.

Adapting a film loosely based on a real life crime case should have generated headlines and endless publicity in the British press. Instead, this similarity has only been reported by a single local newspaper in the Gloucestershire region, because the film is so uninteresting when divorced of this fact it blatantly isn’t worthy of the free publicity. Trespass Against Us isn’t entirely without merit, as individual sequences and character quirks provide some sources of fleeting amusement, but it never escapes the fact that this story is overly familiar and isn’t being told in a manner satisfying enough to warrant interest.

Conclusion

Trespass Against Us is an overwhelmingly forgettable film, telling an unoriginal story with no artistic swagger that can make it feel fresh again. It is a generic true crime tale told in a pedestrian manner – and even though Adam Smith seems like a capable director in his debut, he still has a long way to go to develop a voice to make his film develop and sustain audience interest.

What are your thoughts on Trespass Against Us?

Trespass Against Us is in UK cinemas now and is available on VOD in the US. All international release dates are here.