‘Animol’ review: Ashley Walters’ directorial debut burns with raw, claustrophobic intensity

Dir: Ashley Walters. UK. 2026. 93 mins

Set in a British youth detention centre, Ashley Walters’ directorial debut is a tense and claustrophobic account of one teenager’s 65-day ordeal as he tries to survive in this violent, coercive environment while making some sense of where his life went wrong. Though the participation of Walters’ longtime friend and fellow Adolescence cast member Stephen Graham will help attract attention, the film is carried by the diligent performances of four young actors, led by a smouldering Tut Nyuot, a few months after his breakout turn in the Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk.

Carried by the diligent performances of four young actors

Incendiary and violent, Animol, which premieres in Berlin’s Perspectives strand, is sure to make a splash on its UK release (via Sky, who co-financed with Film4). Larded with youth slang influenced by the UK drill music scene, the film will prove a challenge to subtitle and dub (even the English original features baked-on subtitles at one point). The film arrives in the wake of recent UK youth-custody drama Wasteman, also sold by Bankside, and inevitably invites comparison.

Audiences with long memories may remember the controversy over Alan Clarke’s Scum – a youth prison drama from 1977 that was banned by the network that had commissioned it, public broadcaster the BBC, and emerged two years later as a feature film. Animol’s screenwriter Nick Love pays homage to Clarke’s film (made from a script by Roy Minton) in the very first scene, in which we see three newly-arrested offenders waiting to be admitted to a youth custody centre.

Nyuot’s Troy is a young first-timer, clearly terrified but also, we sense, a quick, resourceful learner. He’s asked by the tough, cynical, well-navigated Dion (Sekou Diaby) to smuggle a package inside – and once there, will be coerced into working for this coolly threatening kingpin, who runs the drug trade in one wing of the institution. The really vulnerable one of the trio is Krystiyan (Vladyslav Baliuk), a sweet-natured Polish kid with whom Troy soon develops a close bond.

Once inside, Troy finds himself in a cell with Mason (Ryan Dean), a tattooed psychopath whose initially mild manner conceals a poorly corked volcano of rage. When we’re first introduced to Stephen Graham’s firm but kindly education officer Claypole, we assume that he is going to be the vector of some sort of redemptive arc. Surprisingly, however, Claypole simply disappears for most of the second act.

In fact, the prison staff in general are conspicuous for their absence. We hear them more than we see them, in motivational lessons about former youth offenders who’ve turned their lives around, or a laughable shirt-ironing class. Meanwhile, Troy is tasked by Dion – who calls him his ‘Liccle Man’ – with retrieving drug packages that are delivered to the grounds by drone.

We also get a glimpse of this conflicted young man’s backstory via visits by his mother Joy (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), a former user who is now clean and trying to repair her relationship with her resentful son. But it’s Animol’s slowly emerging discourse about self-definition and sexuality that is the film’s main contribution to the youth-prison genre. Though the message is not subtly conveyed, it’s still effective in its bitter irony: if there’s one thing all this jail’s gangs and factions can agree on, it’s homophobia.

Animol’s oppressive soundscape is dominated by the clanging of metal doors, by distant yells, thuds and screams. DoP Tasha Back ramps up the suffocating atmosphere with some tasty shallow-focus work, and the film’s highly controlled colour palette of cool blues, lurid reds, garish orange and acid yellows seems like a coding system for a language we don’t have access to. That’s true too of much of the youth slang we hear (“he soaked him up with a Rambo”; “go to the fence and pattern that”). If we flounder at times as we try to interpret what’s going on, that’s not a bad thing, Walters’ impactful debut suggests. So, too, do most of these kids.