Up There
GFT, February 24, 8.15pm
It's far from a wonderful afterlife for Martin (Torchwood's Burn Gorman), who has been knocked over and killed by a car. Death, he discovers, doesn't mean ascending a Powell & Pressburger escalator to Heaven but being trapped by a particularly British institutional bureaucracy where the recently deceased act as "carers" for other new arrivals, sit on uncomfortable plastic chairs in self-help groups, and effectively "sign on" until they're deemed to have detached themselves from worldly ties. Writer-director Zam Salim brilliantly expands his YouTube hit Laid Off into a feature that's quietly serious and laugh-out-loud funny. He finds a washed-out melancholy in his Glasgow and Saltcoats locations and crams the storyline with original ideas that irreverently demolish ghostly myths. Best of all, though, is Gorman's deadpan performance which combines silent comedy physical acting with the sort of confused/exasperated/resigned delivery of lines that makes Martin look like Jack Dee suddenly transplanted into the middle of Wim Wenders's Wings Of Desire.
Alan Morrison
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