Citadel (Ciaran Foy, 2012)

A young father on a condemned estate in an unspecified British city suffers from agoraphobia after the murder of his wife by juvenile hoodies. They continue to hound him until their abduction of his baby daughter forces him to face up to his fear.
The Glasgow tourist board may count themselves lucky that the filming location is not expressly given, for this is effectively hell on Earth, a place too desolate to exist even in the grimiest inner-city or kitchen sink stories. It is clearly meant to be a projection of the character's mental state, and is an element of the film that works relatively well, twinned with the camera's limited field of view at moments of stress, sowing anxiety outside its margins. However, it is over-reliant on this mood and its protagonist's constant petrified whimpering, becoming mired in a single track, and there was really no need to make the faceless gang that torments him supernaturally inhuman: it detracts from any social point the film might otherwise have been able to make alongside the psychological horror, and what remains is a licence for reactionary demonisation of the dregs of society.

4/10