Filmmaker Charlotte Regan has been moving steadily up the creative ladder with music videos, short films and her 2023 feature debut Scrapper, which made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival. Now she takes a crack at a major drama for the BBC with Mint, whose eight 30-minute episodes describe a tale of young love, family dysfunction and gang violence.
At its core is the Glasgow crime dynasty headed by Dylan (Sam Riley), who has been maintaining the thuggish legacy of his appalling father Andy (Clive Russell), but now seems to be wearying of the struggle to keep the operation afloat. Andy, now languishing in jail, is an old-time gangster with a death-before-surrender mentality, but Dylan turns out to have a credibility-stretching secret identity which he’s yearning to express.
The fact that there’s a new rival crime crew in town is pushing Dylan towards chucking the whole thing in, and he has lined up his brutish second-in-command Sam (Neil Leiper) as his successor. Sam likes nothing better than a dash of ultra-violence, involving knives and guns if necessary, and relishes the challenge of wiping out the opposition.
Set against this seething cauldron of blood and testosterone is the unlikely and rather whimsical romance which blossoms between Dylan’s daughter Shannon (a superb Emma Laird) and Arran (Benjamin Coyle-Larner), the offspring of the enemy faction. While the two tribes go to war, this pair meet by chance at a railway station and find themselves wrapped in a fantasy affair which writer/director Regan depicts as quite literally lighter than air, with her protagonists floating in space in an expression of romantic bliss.
However, this updated, urbanised McRomeo and Juliet are doomed to discover that the course of true love can be… well, you can guess the rest. Meanwhile, despite the looming presence of too many ghastly macho thugs, Regan’s story focuses most strongly on the women in the family. Laura Fraser (pictured above with Riley) is excellent as Shannon’s mother Cat, a woman who has been caught up in gruesome gang politics and sexual bullying since she was just a girl, and who is trying to adjust to the realisation that the family she thought she was building is in the process of tumbling around her ears. On the flip side there’s Lindsay Duncan as Ollie (pictured below), Andy’s wife and a fire-breathing matriarch who relishes brutal confrontations and loves pushing her opponents to the limit and watching them crumble.
It’s a fascinating group of characters, but Regan’s mix of raw reality with fantasy and dashes of surrealism doesn’t always pay off. After a powerful start, the focus starts to drift round about the halfway mark, and the drama feels as if it’s wandering around in a daze before girding its loins and galloping towards a thunderous climax.
Along the way, Regan refracts her story through chunks of fuzzy, memory-evoking home video, assorted flashbacks to fill in aspects of her characters, and dreamlike sequences which function like audio-visual facsimiles of sessions with a therapist. Widescreen scenes of landscape or the now-defunct Grangemouth oil refinery (because obviously we don’t need oil any more) are allowed to rotate slowly before our eyes, as if we’ve been gorging on magic mushrooms. It’s a daring and unusual concept which manages to defy categorisation, but it also means that the narrative thread disappears for periods of time. But at only 31, Regan obviously has much more to come.
- The first two episodes of Mint are on BBC One from 9pm on 20 April. All episodes available on BBC iPlayer
- More TV on theartsdesk
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