Protein

There are some places that seem to do their best to doom their inhabitants from the start. The smart ones get out as soon as they can, often in ways that cost them dearly. Some others try to reform them, and exhaust themselves in Sisyphean labour. Most do neither, do little of anything, don’t know what to do as they grow up and so try to drown the pain in drink, resorting to harder substances when that doesn’t work. Places where there are no jobs, where law enforcement is useless and criminals can’t keep order either; where it’s impossible to see a future; where grasping after short term pleasures only deepens the sense of resentment. In such a place, Death might seem a welcome visitor.

When we first meet Sion (Craig Russell), he has nothing. A backpack; a heavy conscience; flashbacks to war and military bullying when he sleeps on the streets. He cleans himself up at a spring in the woods, like an animal acquiring human form. Spends his last few quid at a gym where local guys mock and jeer at him as he works out. They like to think they own the place. When one of them threatens the woman who does (Kezia Burrows), he makes his presence known. She takes a shine to him, beguiled by that human appearance. Offers him a job, and later more besides. He takes the job. He’s not too proud to work as a cleaner, and money will come in useful, since he can’t even afford a room. Instead, he squats in a warehouse, which has the only thing he really needs: a large chest freezer. It’s big enough to hide a few bloody secrets.

When Sion begins to act on his compulsions, even this town experiences shock. Local police chief Stanton (Chatles Dale) has never seen bodies left in this condition before. A detective called Patch (Andrea Hall) is drafted in from London to help. They bond over their shared experiences with alcoholism (like writer/director Tony Burke) and the women who have left them. Patch is sharp, begins to notice things, but she also becomes aware of the poison in this place, and her certainty about what might constitute justice begins to waver.

There’s a deep vein of black comedy running through what might otherwise be a relentlessly grim film, and yet one never feels that Burke lacks sympathy with the people of this benighted Welsh town. Even his bad guys, the wannabe gangsters (much more like the real thing than most film portrayals), have their secrets and their struggles; several are victims of bullying too. The obligation they feel to project a certain kind of masculinity – the only thing that seems to guarantee any safety, or at least did before the arrival of the stranger – makes them vulnerable to exposure.

It’s the breaking down of that masculine confidence, the systemic collapse which accompanies the realisation that muscular men are being picked off one by one, that gives Protein its depth of strangeness. The only other place that men really have to confront that is in war, but, Burke implies, that doesn’t mean that experienced soldiers necessarily know how to keep their balance. Everybody here is lonely. It’s in the small choices that two characters make, looking beyond the harm done to give others a chance, that the film finds its spark of light.

A hit at Frightfest, this one may, in places, be a tough watch, but it has soul.

Reviewed on: 12 Jun 2025