My Feral Heart (2016)

Steven Brandon is great here as "Luke" a young man with Down's Syndrome who looks after his ailing mother at their home. When she dies, he is deemed incapable of fending for himself and goes to live in a residential care home. Initially unsettled, he starts to bond with one of the staff "Eve" (Shana Swash) and with "Pete" (Will Rastall) - a young man doing community service work nearby. "Luke" has a fondness for nature and likes to go for walks. On one such occassion, he encounters a seriously malnourished young girl trapped in a snare. He frees her and carries her to a nearby barn where he tries to nurse her back to health. It also transpires that his pal "Pete" has some demons and the story now proceeds to try to knit these themes together. It's Jane Gull's directional debut, and with Brandon she has a young actor who offers us an engaging perspective of his life and his search for joy and fulfilment. The story itself, though, is an implausible amalgam of scenarios (especially his foundling) and for the most part I felt like we were just plonked into the middle of something - with not enough sense of before, and certainly no sense of conclusion. That said, there is chemistry between the two men, here - Rastall (looks a bit like James Franco?) has a charm about him too - and Gull doesn't allow sentiment to intrude overly even if it does tug at the heart strings now and again. Whilst is touches on social care issues, and on some environmental ones too, this is essentially a snippet from the life of a young man trying to make his own way in a world that would treat him with kid gloves - whether he likes it or not.