The world of ""Fish Tank"" teems with images that should shock audiences—children wander the road side looking for booze, money and general mischief while the few adults that are around scream obscenities at them, pushing them out of view to make way for their own drunken revelry and denials of responsibility. It's clearly a wretched place to grow up, and it's in that hell of urban waste that we find Mia, a 15-year-old aspiring break dancer who responds to this world with violent, obscenity-spewing rage towards her family, peers and even strangers.
Despite Mia's abrasiveness, it's not hard to see what she rebels against. Her mother clearly despises her, stuck in a drunken stupor that prevents her from stringing together a coherent sentence against her daughter's wild streak. Her younger sister calls her an expletive whenever they speak. Early in the film, she's assaulted and nearly raped by a pack of boys wandering the wastes on the outskirts of the city. Mia has nobody to trust in this world, and that sad fact fills her with boundless rage.
For her first film, Katie Jarvis brings an impressive, dark and brooding performance to Mia. She starts the film hardened and closed up, but as the character meets her mother's ""friend"" Connor, she becomes a vulnerable, tragic victim of circumstance.
Mia meets Connor, a muscle-bound Michael Fassbender (""Inglourious Basterds""), when he creeps into the kitchen to sneak a peek of her practicing dance moves to a Ja Rule video on TV. ""You dance like a black,"" he comments crassly, preparing some tea for himself and Mia's mother, who awaits ravished in her bedroom.
Fassbender jumps between this horrid classlessness and sincere compassion for Mia as he becomes a more frequent visitor in their home. He seems to be the male presence that Mia and her sister were always missing in their lives, but there's a very real sexual tension between Mia and Connor that makes us uneasy about her trusting him as some kind of father figure.
There's a scene where Connor carries Mia back to her bed after passing out at a party. He slowly removes her boots, unbuttoning her pants to pull them off as well. We hang on the moment, fearful of what happens next. But then he simply tucks her in and heads back to her mother's room. We breathe a sigh of relief.
Similar to our impressions of Peter Sarsgaard's character in last year's ""An Education,"" it's hard to not be suspicious of Connor's true intentions for Mia and her family. He takes them fishing in a small man-made pond and makes the seemingly innocuous comment, ""People don't come here often. The fish are stupid and easy to catch."" He frequently takes mysterious phone calls from ""his mother."" Something isn't right, and we become increasingly uncomfortable with Mia opening up to an unknown quantity of a man.
""Fish Tank"" becomes the story of a girl learning whom she should trust, and figuring out how to save herself from her own situation. The rough, gritty film shows its characters at their lowest, their ugliest—but when we reach the end, we can at least hope they're better for their suffering.
""Fish Tank""'s run at Sundance will end Thursday. See it before it leaves, or catch it on DVD.
