Out of Control

Colour, BETA SP
United Kingdom, 2002, 102 min
Section: Focus on British Film (2000-2005)

About the film

Winner of Best British Feature at the 2002 Edinburgh International Film Festival, Out Of Control confirmed Dominic Savage’s status as Britain’s premier chronicler of the young and the dispossessed. Having spent several months of research in the country’s toughest housing estates and young offenders institutes, he used improvisations to construct his tale of a teenage boy (Danny Young) who succumbs to peer pressure and is sentenced to a spell in a corrective facility when he’s caught in a stolen car. Sweet and sensitive, he is easy prey for the institute’s most unhinged bully (Leo Gregory), whose own battered self-esteem can only be nourished through destroying others. David Morrissey, recently seen in Basic Instinct 2, plays a concerned prison warder. Gregory’s powerful performance won him many admirers, and he has gone on to star as Brian Jones in Stoned, Stephen Woolley’s film about the deceased Rolling Stone, and in football hooligan drama Green Street Hooligans.

About the director

Dominic Savage (b. 1962, Kent) was a child actor whose roles include Young Bullingdon in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. He studied at Britain’s National Film and Television School, and in 2000 wrote and directed the TV film Nice Girl – the story of a young mother and her soldier husband – for the BBC, winning a TV BAFTA for New Director Fiction. His next drama, When I Was 12 (2001), about a pre-teen runaway, also won a TV BAFTA for Best Single Film. He won yet more acclaim for Out Of Control, including Britain’s Royal Television Society Award for Best Single Film. He followed this with his debut feature film, Love + Hate (2005), an interracial teen love story set in a northern English town, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2005 and was also presented in Karlovy Vary.