A man walks into a convenience store in Wales, steals tuna-flavored cat food, and returns to the small room in which he’s squatting before enjoying the contents of the meal tin himself with a fork. So goes an early scene in Protein, a story ostensibly about an ex-soldier who suffers from PTSD returning to the fringes of society. In reality, this is a multilayered tale about a Welsh town, its inhabitants, and a few visitors.
Craig Russell stars as Sion, a former military man who battles frequent flashbacks to his time as a soldier in Afghanistan. These flashbacks, though brief, heavily feature his commanding officer (Jamie Kenna), whose spectre Sion fears more than the actual combat he endured. Sion finds himself spending time at a tiny local gym, where he comes into contact with its manager, Katrina (Kezia Burrows), and a group of four small-time thugs, led by Dwayne (Kai Owen). Though he keeps to himself, Sion is offered work at the gym by Katrina, who takes a shine to the stoic stranger. Soon, a grisly murder in the town leads a local detective (Charles Dale) to reluctantly team up with a London detective (Andrea Hall) to investigate a possible connection to two recent London murders in the same vein. The four thugs, meanwhile, operate under a shady local nightclub owner named Joe (Richard Mylan), who has frequent dealings with an Albanian crime family and is under consistent suspicion from the local police.
And there’s also the matter of Sion sometimes consuming human organs for sustenance. If that sounds like a lot of story threads to comfortably pack into a 97-minute film, that’s because it is. Protein seeks to provide a story that’s one-third small-town crime thriller, one-third exploration between pairs of people who struggle to connect, and one-third gross-out, liver-and-intestines violence.
There’s a compelling theme baked into the film about hierarchy in various relationships, whether it’s commanding officers and their soldiers or club owners and their henchmen. In an early scene, Dwayne tells lackey Kevin (Steve Meo) that there’s a pecking order and that Kevin finds himself “at the bottom”.
Themes of trauma and revenge are touched upon, if not fully explored. And the film has a solid sense of self-deprecation, featuring a few amusing moments which mostly involve the knuckle-headed thugs who serve as the connective tissue between storylines. The practical effects, especially concerning the slimy organs and human biomatter, are effective enough to make one wince, and the sound effects are suitably, appropriately gross.
These themes and characters sometimes feel like disparate pieces of different films, and though it shows glimpses of promise, it doesn’t necessarily all come together in the end, despite the neat bow clumsily placed on the film’s final sequences. Still, when you throw in solid performances, competent filmmaking, and bits of gore and humour into a glass, blend it up with some protein powder, and pour the results into a few glasses, you’re bound to find some folks who enjoy it for what it is and not what it seeks to be.
Protein is in cinemas on Friday, June 13th. It will be available on VoD on Monday, July 14th.
