Set within the D wing of an unnamed British prison, “Wasteman” (2025), by first-time director Cal McMau, offers a brutal insight into life behind bars. The film opens with shaky, hand-held phone footage of an assault where a television is smashed into a man’s skull. It is an in-your-face introduction to the violent world of prison life. The wing is ruled by two drug-dealing kingpins who mete out punishments to anyone who crosses them. Within this prison hierarchy, long-term inmate Taylor (David Jonsson) is counting down the days to a possible early release. Just as he begins to imagine life beyond the wing, his prison life is disrupted by the arrival of a new cellmate, Dee (Tom Blyth).
Dee quickly becomes an unlikely ally in Taylor’s world. With easy bravado, he challenges the existing hierarchy and becomes a new drug dealer in the wing’s black-market economy of spice and pills. Yet his arrival also undermines Taylor’s deliberate invisibility in the prison wing. A vicious attack forces Taylor into an impossible calculation: protect Dee and risk his parole or safeguard his own freedom at the cost of loyalty.
At a lean 90 minutes, “Wasteman” wastes no time on sentimental backstory for its characters. Instead, its tight dialogue zeroes in on the immediate pressures bearing down on men who have little to look forward to. Again and again, they lay bare their raw emotions, whether anger, bravado, or flashes of self-pity. These emotions ricochet around the wing with nowhere else to go.
These emotions play out within the tight confines of a cell that McMau frames to intensify the film’s suffocating claustrophobia. This emphasis on compressed space is persistent throughout, making Wasteman’s cinematography its most accomplished feature. The camera rarely settles, pressing into corners of the cell and hovering uncomfortably close to bodies to capture the suffocating nature of prison life. Hand-held footage recurs throughout the film. These snatches of illicitly filmed clips by the prisoners themselves, full of drill raps and big-man bravado about their status, intercut with more composed widescreen shots of the wing.
The contrast between this grimy footage and coolly lit wide shots of the prison wing conveys the instability of prison life. McMau’s cinematography shows that the formal life of the UK prison is a façade. Wasteman’s handheld filmed clips feel like contraband themselves and smuggle insights into real-world prison life. The score, produced by electronic artist Forest Swords, also enhances this atmosphere with drum ’n’ bass elements that throb beneath the dialogue. Its jagged rhythms mirror the wing’s volatility and amplify moments of tension between the characters.
If the camera and sound design highlight Wasteman’s claustrophobic setting, the performances give the film its emotional weight. The plot relies upon two performances that balance aggression and sensitivity. Taylor is played with careful restraint by David Jonsson. Taylor is a man who has learned to make himself smaller through his body language. His shoulders are consistently hunched, and his eyes are always lowered to the ground. There is no aggressiveness in Jonsson’s performance. Instead, his primary emotions are fear and longing, particularly when conversations turn to his teenage son, Adam. The promise of release has made Taylor cautious, and he cannot afford the impulsiveness of other prisoners.
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Into the tense stillness of Taylor’s world steps Dee. Blyth gives him a magnetic swagger that makes an impression on the audience. From the moment he arrives in Taylor’s cell, lugging contraband designer clothes, he quickly undermines the wing’s hierarchy. Unlike Taylor, Dee is not content to blend in. Where Taylor folds in on himself, Dee expands outward through confident body language and a deliberately loud voice that draws attention from guards and other prisoners.
He boasts access to drones capable of dropping packages into the yard and doesn’t care that he is stepping onto other drug dealers’ territory. Beneath the bravado is a sharp understanding of people’s vulnerabilities. Dee recognises Taylor’s weak spots, particularly his aching distance from his son and the restrictions imposed by the boy’s mother. With unnerving ease, he offers solutions: he can track down Adam and send gifts. Even before the plot fully develops, we know that Dee is not offering Taylor a gift. This gift is going to require payback.
Where “Wasteman” exceeds expectations is in its refusal of the lazy moral binaries of the prison-drama genre. Instead, characters who are at once abrasive are still painfully recognisable. We may dislike Taylor’s cowardice but understand his desire to be reconciled with his son. We may also understand Dee’s ruthless bravado, but we also recognise it as a survival strategy determined by a system that rewards aggression.
We catch snatches of vulnerability when Dee talks about his family and background. The relationship between the two men drives the latter half of “Wasteman,” and what begins as camaraderie in a shared cell curdles into something much more transactional. Dee takes Taylor “under his wing,” but the experience is double-edged for Taylor. In the world of prison, protection is never free, and it accrues interest.
At its best, Wasteman’s suffocating cinematography does more than document brutality. Instead, it seems to embed the viewer inside the cell with its main characters. The walls may be concrete, but the real confinement lies in the often-lethal debts that prisoners accrue to survive inside them. McMau’s debut is not interested in easy redemption arcs of more conventional prison dramas. Instead, it leaves the audience with the queasy recognition that prison systems built on punishment inevitably reproduce violence.
“Wasteman” is a tough watch and too unsparing to offer catharsis. But McMau still strips the prison drama back to the raw, uncontrolled emotions of its characters, and what he delivers through “Wasteman” is a film that grips hard and doesn’t let go.
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