- UK release: May 2011
- Director: Joe Cornish · Writer: Joe Cornish
- Studio / distributor: Film4; StudioCanal; Big Talk Pictures; Optimum Releasing
- Genre: Science-fiction siege comedy / urban action · Runtime: 88 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: John Boyega as Moses; Jodie Whittaker (Venus, St Trinian’s) as Sam; Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) as Ron; Franz Drameh as Dennis
- IMDb: 6.7 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 90% critics / 75% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Joe Cornish is best known to British audiences as one half of Adam and Joe, the pair who spent years taking the mickey out of films on Channel 4 and Radio 6. So there is a pleasing nerve in his deciding, for his first feature, to make one of his own and aim it squarely at the genre cinema he grew up loving. Attack the Block is a monster movie set on a council estate in South London, shot for very little money, and it carries itself with the confidence of someone who has watched a great many siege films and worked out exactly what makes them tick.
The setup
It is Bonfire Night in Brixton. Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a nurse walking home, is mugged at knifepoint by a gang of teenagers led by Moses (John Boyega). The robbery is interrupted when something falls out of the sky and lands on a nearby car, and when Moses goes to investigate, the something bites him. What he kills in retaliation turns out to be the first of many: larger, faster, blacker-than-black creatures with rows of glowing teeth start dropping across the estate. The gang retreats to the tower block they call home, and the night becomes a fight to hold the building against an enemy nobody will believe is real. The film asks you to spend ninety minutes rooting for the same boys who robbed a woman in its opening scene, and it knows exactly what it is doing in asking.
The cast
The find here is John Boyega, who plays Moses with a still, watchful heaviness well beyond his years. He barely raises his voice, and the film leans on that restraint; the whole arc, from sullen ringleader to reluctant defender of the estate, plays out in his face rather than in speeches. Jodie Whittaker gives Sam more spine than the victim role usually allows, and her gradual, grudging alliance with the gang is the spine of the film. Around them the younger cast, mostly unknowns, talk over each other in the genuine slang of the place, which keeps the comedy local and unforced. Nick Frost turns up as Ron, a genial weed dealer presiding over a top-floor grow room, and brings exactly the seam of stoner comedy his Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz audience will be expecting.
The craft
For a film made on a shoestring, Attack the Block looks remarkably assured. Cornish and his cinematographer Thomas Townend shoot the estate as a maze of corridors, stairwells and lift shafts, all sodium-orange light and deep shadow, which lets the creatures stay mostly unseen and all the more frightening for it. The monster design is the smartest economy in the picture: matte-black fur that swallows light, with only the bioluminescent blue-white teeth catching the eye, so a man in a suit becomes a genuine threat the budget could never have bought with pixels. Steven Price and Basement Jaxx supply a score that fuses orchestral menace with grime and rave, and it does a lot to keep the energy up. At eighty-eight minutes the thing never sags; Cornish gets in, sets the trap, springs it, and gets out.
How it stacks up
The obvious British touchstone is Shaun of the Dead, and Nick Frost’s presence invites the comparison, but Cornish is after something with a harder edge. The truer ancestor is John Carpenter, and Assault on Precinct 13 in particular: a fixed location, a small group holding off a relentless assault through one long night. There is Gremlins in the creature mischief and the comic timing, and a clear debt to the kids-on-bikes adventure tradition, here recast with mopeds and a tower block instead of suburban cul-de-sacs. What Cornish adds is a sense of place that none of those films had, a Brixton estate rendered with affection rather than the usual hand-wringing, where the social texture is part of the horror and part of the joke at once.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it strongly, sitting at 90% and praising the wit, the pace, the creature work and Boyega above all. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm but more divided, around 75%, and you can see the fault line: the film opens with its heroes committing a real crime against a sympathetic woman, and it never quite apologises for asking you to side with them afterwards. Some viewers cannot get past that opening, and the objection is honest. I find it the bravest thing in the film. Cornish refuses to soften the boys into cuddly scamps; he makes you earn your sympathy alongside Sam, and the estate’s own logic of who is and is not a threat becomes part of what the film is chewing on.
Verdict
This is a small film with a big appetite, and it satisfies most of it. The world-building is sharp, the monsters are genuinely scary on a budget that should not have allowed it, and Boyega announces himself as someone to watch. It is funny, fast, and over before it can wear out its welcome, which makes it eminently rewatchable. It loses a little for the thinness of the supporting characters, who are types more than people, and the social provocation of the opening will not sit right with everyone. But on energy, invention and sheer command of its genre, it is one of the most enjoyable British films of the year. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. Catch it on the big screen for the sound design alone; DVD and Blu-ray will follow later in the year.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: John Boyega’s career did exactly what the film promised, with the lead in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) arriving only a few years later, which has retroactively turned Attack the Block into the film that discovered him. Cornish went on to write for Ant-Man and The Adventures of Tintin before directing the family adventure The Kid Who Would Be King (2019). The film has settled comfortably into cult-classic standing, regularly revived at repertory screenings, and is now widely available on disc, digital and rotating streaming services. A long-mooted sequel has been talked up by cast and director without yet materialising.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong language, violence, gore and soft drug use. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There is strong gory violence when aliens attack humans, ripping their throats and faces, with sight of blood spurts. A decapitation is also implied.
Threat and horror: There are scenes of threat. Most involve aliens but some sequences are more realistic in nature, such as a person being held up and threatened by a gang at knifepoint.
Language: There is frequent use of strong language (‘fk’, ‘motherfker’), as well as milder terms.
Sex: There are some mild comic sex references, including to STIs.
Drugs: Characters are seen growing, selling and smoking marijuana. There is also sight of cocaine being sold, but not used.
Injury detail: There is sight of green alien blood and gore after aliens are attacked. There is sight of blood and injuries after humans are attacked.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
