Mike McCahill 

We Are Monster review – goes inside a murderer’s mind

Putting us inside the head of Zahid Mubarek’s murderer, Robert Stewart, is well-intentioned, but his racist rhetoric drowns out nuance
  
  

We Are Monster
We Are Monster … Leeshon Alexander as Robert Stewart. Photograph: /pr

This Noel Clarke-produced indie tries hard to fashion a powerful statement on the murder of Zahid Mubarek at Feltham young offenders’ institution in 2000, even as a pronounced gap opens up between ambition and execution: spinning off from a monologue delivered by Mubarek’s racist killer Robert Stewart (screenwriter Leeshon Alexander), it plays like clumsily opened-out fringe theatre.

The film team review We Are Monster

Director Antony Petrou fosters a brooding atmosphere, but there are obvious limitations to putting us inside Stewart’s head for 85 minutes: the relentless white-supremacist rhetoric becomes exhausting, drowns out any subtler editorial points, and leaves Mubarek himself a mere cypher. Well-intentioned, but flawed.

 

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