Scum

A chance encounter by a window cleaner leads to a host of emotions and buried memories resurfacing and being brought to the fore.

Luke (Findlay), seems like a regular enough guy. We meet him as he heads out for the day and spends time in the local coffee shop where his girlfriend, Chloe (Cvetoshenko) works. The dynamic between the two seems affectionate enough and Luke comes across as a quiet and sympathetic character. Later on, Luke is finishing up some work for a local resident who he does odd jobs for, nominally washing the windows and such like. Today, this customer (Broderick) offers Luke some more work, for her brother who lives a few streets away, and he is only too happy to help out and add another potential customer to his client list. So off Luke pops to the other house to get started on a bit of window cleaning, but when he spots just whose house it is as he wipes away the smears, he immediately downs tools and runs away from the scene.

The next morning it becomes obvious that something is really bothering Luke, as he snaps at and berates Chloe just for showing an interest in him and how he’s feeling. This leads to Luke spending some time in his van before getting a call to say that he’s left his tools at the new customer’s house. Reluctantly, Luke turns up again on the doorstep of his new client (Johnston) and an encounter begins which will shed light on the whole situation.

Scum, which was written and directed by Louis Findlay as well as starring him in the lead role, then becomes a film about sexual abuse, as Luke faces up to his abuser and the past comes out. The film really hinges around this encounter and most of the dialogue of the movie comes from this one scene alone. It is unfortunate then that this scene never really gets sold, with some fairly perfunctory dialogue delivered by some really poor acting, especially from the would-be abuser. The emotion from either of the two main characters is never really carried forward and the two remain very static despite the high tension expected from the scenario they find themselves in. Yes, Luke does become enraged and forces himself into a threatening posture, but it is never really believable and nothing comes from it anyway, which is a real let-down for the whole of the film. If nothing was going to happen in the end anyway, then what was the whole film for?

A lot of this static feeling also comes from the way the short film is directed, with plenty of standing shots where the camera doesn’t move at all. Scenes are given from fixed points while the dialogue shifts between characters, leaving the audience feeling as though they are being left out somewhat from the situation. Then in the times where we are given reverse angles, the audio is sometimes mismatched to the video and we can see the movements of the person speaking contrasting with the words spoken. The audio, too, in general isn’t well handled and feels tinny and distant throughout.

While Scum tries to tackle a difficult and important subject, and does it’s best to keep the scenario grounded in the real world, there’s just not enough drama in the film to truly engage the viewer. The technical aspects hinder the audience’s enjoyment and the poor acting stultifies any meaning the dialogue may have had. For a theme with so much raw emotion and primal feeling behind it, Scum comes across as being very bland and toothless in the way it portrays the very real trauma its main character is supposed to have endured.