Wasteman (2025)
British prison dramas have a long and fairly distinguished lineage, from the kitchen-sink realism of the 1960s through to the grimier, more procedural territory that television has largely claimed in recent decades. Wasteman, arriving in 2025 from director Cal McMau and produced through a cluster of UK independents including Bankside Films, Agile Films, and Hoopsa Films, plants itself firmly in that tradition: a tight, single-location crime thriller that is more interested in two men sharing a cell than in the machinery of crime outside its walls. At 91 minutes, it is lean by design, and the stripped-back premise, a man days from parole and the disruptive arrival of a volatile new cellmate, gives the whole thing a pressure-cooker quality that the filmmakers use to their advantage.
McMau works from a script by Eoin Doran and Hunter Andrews, and the writing is disciplined if spare, parcelling out backstory carefully and keeping the focus on the relationship between its two leads rather than any broader social statement. The production sits comfortably in the tradition of low-budget British filmmaking that prizes performance and atmosphere over scale, something that companies like Agile Films have developed a reliable eye for. It's All Made Up Productions also has a credit here, and between them the studios have put together something that, on paper at least, is polished but unremarkable in its ambitions.
The principal cast is anchored by David Jonsson as Taylor, the prisoner navigating those final, precarious days before release. Jonsson has had a busy and varied couple of years on screen, and I also reviewed him in Alien: Romulus and The Long Walk, where he made a strong impression in both. Tom Blyth plays Dee, the cellmate whose arrival throws everything into jeopardy, and the dynamic between the two is really the engine the film runs on. Alex Hassell, Paul Hilton, and Neil Linpow fill out the supporting ranks, each bringing enough weight to make the world feel populated beyond the central pairing, even if the script rarely lingers on them for long. For a companion piece in a different register, see also Scrapper, another British film that finds considerable texture in a narrow human situation.
Cinematographer Lorenzo Levrini keeps things close and deliberately confined: the photography favours tight framings and institutional light, the sort of palette where fluorescent whites and concrete greys do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting. There is not much in the way of visual flourish, which feels like a considered choice rather than a limitation. The editing, handled by James A. Demetriou and Ryan Morrison, is crisp and unshowy, keeping the 91-minute runtime from ever feeling slack. The score comes from Forest Swords, the Liverpool-based electronic musician Matthew Barnes, who brings a characteristically unsettling textural quality to the sound design: low drones and fractured rhythms that sit beneath the action without ever announcing themselves too loudly. It is the kind of score that you feel more than you consciously hear, which suits the material well.
The reason to watch Wasteman is David Jonsson, and by now that is becoming a reliable reason to watch just about anything.
I have caught him in a handful of things lately, the standout of Alien: Romulus, strong in The Long Walk, very good in Rye Lane, and he has fast become one of the most watchable young actors going, the sort who can carry a film on his own. The snag here is that he rather has to.
There is not a great deal to Wasteman beyond him, so more weight falls on those shoulders than in the better films I have seen him in, and to his credit he takes it.
The story itself is about as simple as they come. Jonsson plays a prisoner a week or so from early release after a thirteen-year stretch, lumbered with a violent new cellmate who deals in more or less anything, trying to keep his nose clean, no easy thing when he is fighting an addiction of his own, while staying on the right side of the various threats circling him. There is a son he keeps in touch with on the quiet, and a strong twist near the end that I would not dream of spoiling.
It is all perfectly watchable, and Jonsson lifts it above that in patches, but there is no getting round how slight it is. Three stars, a good film rather than a very good one, held up almost single-handedly by an actor well worth keeping an eye on.
Wasteman is the sort of film that the British independent sector produces with quiet regularity, modest in scale, serious in intent, and reliant on its actors to make good on promises the budget alone cannot keep. Whether it lingers will depend largely on how much you warm to Jonsson, who is doing something genuinely interesting with a relatively thin set of materials. A three-star film, then, but one that earns those three stars honestly rather than coasting on them. The best argument for watching it is also the simplest: some actors are worth watching even when the film around them is not quite worthy of them, and knowing which ones those are is half the pleasure of paying attention.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-09-24
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Wasteman (2025) on YouTube
Where to watch
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