Flasz On Film

The first thing you see in Wasteman is a short compilation of vertically-shot footage, likely obtained using a smartphone, unfolding on the central third of the screen. In it, a kaleidoscope of violence. Two inmates surrounded by a group of thugs, accused of stealing drugs they were supposed to sell, I believe. It doesn’t take long for things to escalate. Violence erupts. A man is savagely beaten, his head smashed with a TV.

When the image opens up to fill the entire screen, we see the other prisoner, Taylor (David Jonsson), whisked out of his cell by a guard. He learns he is to leave prison on licence, subject to good behaviour over the coming week. Prisons are overpopulated and he is deemed low-risk enough to be released. But we all know it won’t be as easy. Keeping his head down won’t cut it because immediately thereafter he meets his new cellmate Dee (Tom Blyth), a certifiable agent of chaos; deranged lunatic prone to extreme violence and ready to flip the pecking order in the cell block on its head. The film then proceeds to detail that last week of prison, which is far from peaceful.

Long story short, Wasteman—as judged by the above synopsis—fits the parameters of a formulaic prison drama. In fact, it satisfies the requirements of one of two possible main storytelling scaffolds used in this genre. When it comes to movies about life on the inside, we either see movies about surviving prison or escaping from it. This is an example of the former. Director Cal McMau is not interested in reinventing the wheel or adding a new modality to the venerable template of prison drama. It is a part of the point of movies about life behind prison walls to fit that template. After all, prisons are immune to passage of time. Despite the fact that technology has penetrated them—drugs are delivered to prisoners by drones, smartphones are kept in secret to stay in touch with the outside world—they are still run by barbaric rules. Might is right. Men co-exist under an omnipresent threat of outright aggression where abrupt violence can come out of nowhere at any second and cover the camera lens in blood.

Thus, the film is not to be watched for its novelty, which is mostly confined to these infrequent vertical inserts capturing lawlessness, violence and many shades of tribal behaviour. It is to be watched for the strength of its character-led narrative where we are asked to get invested in the plight of a man who is inching close to being able to leave this veritable hellscape.

Predictably, this isn’t an easy film to sit through. And it is not necessarily because it is filled to the brim with graphic violence. Objectively speaking, it is not the case. There are far bloodier and gorier films out there you can choose to head out and see. But much like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1974, which didn’t sport anywhere near as much graphic violence as people claimed it did, Wasteman will make you feel as though it was an experience soaked in gore. This is a product of the filmmaking sensibility exhibited by the creative team putting the film together. Again, like Tobe Hooper who paid incredible attention to creating an atmosphere of authenticity, Wasteman stays up close and personal with its characters, less than an inch away from their perilous predicament. Although the story unfolds predictably and anyone with a cursory knowledge of the prison drama template will be able to tell with remarkable ease that the movie can proceed in one of a handful of possible directions, it is the journey through this narrative that is harrowing, not the events themselves.

The violence is ever-present. Aggression materializes instantaneously. The vérité approach employed to evoke this is what is largely responsible for overwhelming the viewer and turning this movie into an extremely intense and harrowing spectacle. We might not see knives entering people’s abdomens, nor would we see close-ups of insides spilling out, eyes gouged out with abandon or deep gashes produced in the wake of ruthless slicing with makeshift shivs. But the camera is so close to what happens that it does not matter. We can almost smell the blood and fear. We participate in the horror of having to live alongside explosive maniacs. In fact, Jonnson and Blyth manage to occasionally lure us into a false sense of security as faux camaraderie blossoms, a survival mechanism to be sure. Only to remind us that prison is not a picnic.

Wasteman looks for intimacy with men locked behind bars and finds humanity and sorrow in at least one of them. Taylor’s long and hard road out of hell adds up therefore to something that is rarely found in this space. The film is authentic and gritty. It almost emits a smell, so close it gets to its subjects. But it steers clear of indulgences and clichés. Nobody drops a bar of soap. We are spared gratuitous sodomy. Its implicit threat is more than enough to trick the viewer’s body into secreting excess adrenaline.

Therefore, formulaic and predictable as it is, Wasteman is most definitely worth experiencing. Authentic and uncompromising in its own mission of distressing the viewer by means of total sensory envelopment, it is a broadly successful addition to an otherwise stale microgenre. A feat that was only possible because the two central players committed so profoundly to their respective characters of a man wishing to redeem his sins and an agent of chaos bent on burning down the world and corrupting everyone he touches, and because the camera audaciously got as close to the subject matter as it was humanly possible without formally adopting a first-person perspective.