Relentless (Trailer)

It is said that you can tell if a book is good or not after the first ten pages. The same thing happens with a movie, more precisely with the trailer of a movie. Yes (it is a premiere even for our festival!), director Steven Murphy competes with the trailer of his next feature, ‘Relentless‘, providing us the premises of a dynamic storyline which takes place in the miserable suburbs of British space. At first glance, we are more than delighted to see in this cinematic experiment an attractive Guy Ritchie-like panorama of criminal gangs that oscillate between visceral violence and English sarcasm. Thus, the director creates a picaresque protagonist, a delightful brute, who fights against bad guys led by refined villains, adopting a catchy narrative structure, through which the spectators empathize with the destinies of the heroes who have been deprived of the comfort of a normal life. In Steven Murphy’s trailer we interact with prisoners, criminals, prostitutes, migrants, defiant teenagers, all surprised with naturalness, through a spontaneous daily language that synthesizes their entire existence.

It is difficult to accurately render the main conflict of this film, since the director cuts down in this trailer some fragmentary sequences that do not deliver a general perspective on the story. The only thing we’re sure of is that Jake, a former prisoner, runs the risk of losing his chance to start a new life as he gets into trouble trying to defend Ava, a feminine presence that rocks his existence.

Although it is hard to anticipate the ending of the story (but, hey, isn’t that the purpose of a trailer?), the homogenous style through which Steven Murphy ironically surprises the extreme violence of underground wars has managed to catch our attention. As a matter of fact, the director opts for a winning formula, creating a special protagonist who, although seeming to incarnate the very accurate profile of a brute, conceals a golden heart that convinces him to privilege justice, to the detriment of his own comfort. The alert sequences combined with the intimate details made this trailer to increase our curiosity, since the couple Jake-Ava ticks the typology of a troublemaker duo who usually manages to amplify any linear story about the marginal violence of the big cities. Through its extremely dynamic style, the ‘Relentless’ movie trailer has definitely surprised us so much that we are eager to see the rest of the story.