Aneil Karia
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There are more than a few parallels to the Safdies’ 2017 thriller Good Time (right down to a bluffed bank robbery that results in an ink pack going off), but the focus is more on social breakdown than the tragic follies of a flawed protagonist.
Aneil Karia’s debut feature is (intentionally) uncomfortable viewing from first to last, reminiscent in its apparent aims and mood as the Safdie brothers’ Good Time and Uncut Gems .
His crime spree often hits familiar beats; a Post Office robbery even ends in the same manner as the ill fated heist that opens the Safdie’s Good Time , which this often feels like it’s striving to be the British cousin of.
A rare shot of genuinely frenzied energy in British genre cinema, “Surge” seems likely to prompt comparisons to the recent work of Benny and Josh Safdie — in particular, 2017’s Robert Pattinson starrer “Good Time,” another untethered study of an amateur criminal undone by his own escalating neuroses.
Like Russell Crowe’s recent (inferior) Unhinged or the Michael Douglas classic Falling Down , the three screenwriters — Rupert Jones, Rita Kalnejais, and Aneil Karia — explore the plight of the Angry White Man who’s had enough with the constraints of contemporary society (and, in this case, parental abuse, I guess?), and rebels against it.
We’ve seen this narrative countless times, especially in Falling Down from Joel Schumacher.
On the surface, as more than a few critics have pointed out, the film plot-wise at least is Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down from 1993 with Michael Douglas, but without the rollicking anti-establishment energy.
It’s not too long before all these stressors make Joseph finally snap, resulting in an hour-long English riff on Falling Down (or, as I like to call it, A Jolly Tumble ).
“Surge” is one man’s experiment in going full Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” a lean, reached-his-breaking-point thriller of the “Falling Down” order.
A particular highlight is when Joseph tests the limits of his behaviour among strangers, at one point crashing a wedding reception with a surreal brand of confrontation that’s far closer to Denis Lavant’s sewer dwelling Monsieur Merde from Holy Motors than any conventional depiction of a man lashing out at society.