Detainment (2018)

There are two really impressive and emotionally-charged performances from Ely Solan and Leon Hughes here but the rest of the feature seems uncomfortably prurient. It was huge news in the UK in 1993 when toddler James Bulger was abducted and murdered by two older children, so this dramatisation is bound to touch nerves as it uses selected transcripts from their police interviews to map out just what happened on that day. These events took place long before there was CCTV everywhere so piecing things together requires not just their increasingly panic-stricken and upsetting statements, but also observations of their encounters with other citizens concerned that this youngster appeared to be in distress, but who were unable to directly intervene in what ultimately became a tragedy. My problem here is that I wasn’t quite sure what the purpose of this was. It’s not exactly a police reconstruction, but it doesn’t really offer us much by way of contextualisation either. Making this a quarter of a century later offered filmmaker Vincent Lambe a chance to try to incorporate some sort of psychological profile of the two lads. Something that might have explained or even mitigated their behaviour. Who were they? What do we now know about their upbringing or what might have motivated this behaviour? They were, after all, barely ten years old themselves so could they even distinguish between right and wrong, or comprehend the consequences of their violence? It is an interesting concept, but focuses too closely, and incompletely, on just one very dramatic thread.