Golden Stripes (2023)

I think this only got one night in cinemas here in the UK, and despite the fact that director Peace Osigbe raises some very serious issues, it's not hard to see why. We start out with a young "Tyrone" in a church where he is the "special friend" of the priest. Nothing graphic but it's very clear what is going on... Skip forward a few years and he (Elikem Agbesi) is now a young man, an aspiring artist whose adoptive, loving, mum just wants him to be a lawyer, or a doctor... Meantime, the police are hot on the heels of a marauding gang of rapists who are terrorising the young women of the community. His younger sister "Folasade" (Tanya Lindsay) has a near miss with those monsters but sadly for the family, another tragedy isn't very far away... It now falls to "Folosade" and "Naomi" (Isobel Moon) to get to the bottom of a mystery that is going to shake the foundations of their family to the core. Hmmm. Well that could all have been very interesting had any of the characters been allowed to have any depth. Amidst a warning of brutality, we find an ostensibly bright young girl wandering through a park at night on her own. It's implausible - bordering on the silly at times. The underlying premiss of brutality is there because we know it is, not because this film puts any meat on the bones of racism, violence and systemic abuse we are expecting. Far too much is left to our own sense of disgust, horror - fair play, even. The acting is adequate but the script gives nobody very much to work with and I'm afraid that it looks every inch the product of the meagre £80k budget it is supposed to have had. It does highlight issues of merit, it just doesn't capitalise on them at all well.