We Are Monster

With just five hours of his 90-day sentence left to serve, British Asian teenager Zahin Mubarek was bludgeoned to death with a table leg by Robert Stewart, his cellmate at Feltham Young Offenders' Institution. Actor/writer Leeshon Alexander has purportedly based his screenplay on the facts of the 2000 case, but there is simply too much speculation and omission for this re-creation to convince as either a portrait of a racist psychotic or an exposé of the systematic failings of a prison renowned for gang activity and violence. Alexander and director Antony Petrou examine Stewart's mental instability using confrontations between his alter egos, a heavy-handed device that includes Stewart's supremacist side revisiting his abusive childhood at the hands of his bigoted father. Aymen Hamdouchi tries to make an impression as Mubarek, but Alexander is solely interested in Stewart's psyche and the institutionalised ignorance of the stereotypical screws. The film certainly succeeds in generating a mood of claustrophobic menace, but the dramatic elements are too often clumsily realised.