JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Katie Jarvis reminds me of Linda Fiorentino.

The easy description of British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank would be “Insiang meets Flashdance” or “downmarket version of An Education”. Neither label summons up the pure, unarticulated rage of its protagonist Mia (Katie Jarvis in an electric performance), a 15-year-old who lives with her slovenly young mother and her foul-mouthed kid sister. She is Anger in a Hoodie: she hates her mother, her life, everybody; she drinks, gets into fights, steals, does stupid things. Filmmaker Arnold pulls us into Mia’s world of rundown tenements with boarded-up windows, trailer parks, vacant lots along the highway, young girls copying the dancers on music videos like whores in training. “At risk” doesn’t begin to describe this teenager.

The only good thing in her life is hip-hop dancing, which she practises ferociously, alone. One day her mother brings home a new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender of Hunger); his arrival hits the household like a testosterone bomb.

Michael Fassbender, I love.

He’s sexy, charming, and actually seems nice; he draws Mia out of herself and encourages her dancing. She responds to him both as a fatherless child and as a hormonal teenager. It gets messy.

Fish Tank is too honest and tough-minded to offer a facile resolution. Our heroine—because even when we want to slap her, we can’t help rooting for her—does not get rescued from her squalid life. No, if anyone is going to rescue the girl, it’ll have to be the girl herself, but first she has to go to the brink. She has to realize the worst that can happen, and choose not to let it happen. What she finds is the closest thing to a happy ending this fierce little movie can offer: self-knowledge.