“Fish Tank” Movie Trailer Review

By our guest blogger, Lita Robinson

Andrea Arnold’s second full-length feature, which won this year’s Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, centers on Mia (played by Katie Jarvis, a first-time actress), a 15-year-old girl with a love for dance and a major chip on her shoulder. Mia lives in a depressing world--her alcoholic mother abuses her in all sorts of ways, and her physical environment (a grim, gray tenement complex) seems to mirror the bleakness of her own inner life.

Mia seems consigned to a life as tragic and self-fulfilling as her mother’s, and this is what frustrates her and what she fights against. Her habit of getting into physical fights (which she does at least three times just in the short span of the movie's trailer) is a metaphor for the fight she is waging all the time against her place in society--she wants to escape the depressing circumstances she was born into, but doesn’t see a clear way out. Enter her mother’s new boyfriend, played by Irish hunk Michael Fassbender (most recently seen as the film critic in Tarantino’s "Inglourious Basterds"). He strikes up a friendship with Mia that immediately seems a little too close for comfort, and their subsequent encounters illuminate the gray areas in both character’s lives.

Both actors are being roundly praised for their performances; Katie Jarvis in particular is garnering high praise for her fierceness as a first-timer. A.O. Scott of the New York Times lauded the film as “nearly flawless” while Dana Stevens of Slate.com compared it to "Precious," describing it as “by far the better movie.”

Though director Arnold wrote the screenplays for both "Fish Tank" and her first feature, "Red Road," she is rumored to have recently signed on to direct a new adaptation of "Wuthering Heights," which, The Guardian reports, will star either Natalie Portman, Abbie Cornish, or Gemma Arterton.

View the trailer for "Fish Tank" below. What are your thoughts?