Michael J. Long’s Wrenching Directorial Debut

Baby Brother, set in Liverpool, is not easy viewing for a number of reasons. Firmly in the tradition of Britain’s kitchen-sink realism movement, the gritty drama features copious amounts of brutality of both the emotional and physical varieties. It is also demanding of the audience in its storytelling, depicting two separate days years apart and alternating between black-and-white for the past and color for the present.

The results, not surprisingly, are at times disjointed. But Michael J. Long’s directorial debut showcases a stylistic audacity rare in a first-time filmmaker, and there’s no denying the raw power of this wrenching picture, which is receiving its world premiere at the Oldenburg Film Festival.

The story revolves around the relationship between Adam (Paddy Rowan) and his younger sibling Liam (Brian Comer), who don’t exactly enjoy the benefits of a happy home life. Their mother (Julia Ross), who struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, is the sort who screams “Get a job or get out!” to Adam when she’s been drinking. Their stepfather is violently abusive, at one point holding a kitchen knife to her throat in front of her sons.

The brothers nonetheless enjoy a close relationship, their propensity for mischief depicted in a very amusing scene in which they sneak into a theater during a rehearsal and engage in mockingly pretentious banter analyzing the performances. Adam is deeply protective of Liam, who dreams of becoming a professional fighter. And he works hard to earn extra money to compensate for the money their mother spends on drugs, even cutting the grass of an elderly neighbor. But he’s ultimately unable to prevent himself from spiraling into violence and addiction as a result of his troubled environment, eventually paying a heavy price for it.  

Five years later, Adam returns to see his brother, who now has a very pregnant girlfriend (Kathryn McGurk). “Liam told me all about you,” she says cooly upon their first meeting. “Good things, I hope,” Adam replies hopefully. “Not really,” she retorts. One of the most disturbing episodes involve the sudden reappearance of an old childhood friend (a scary AJ Jones), whose bald head sports an enormous bloody gash. It quickly becomes clear that Adam’s efforts to protect his sibling have failed, with Liam having lapsed into the same troubled behavior as him.

The filmmaker, working from a screenplay co-written with Tom Sidney, delivers a searing portrait of the sort of generational trauma that is all too common when financial struggles are thrown into the mix. Despite the constrains of an obviously very low budget, the film looks terrific, thanks to David Short’s versatile cinematography that proves equally striking in both B&W and color.

Both lead performers are superb, especially in their skillful delineation of the ways in which their characters have changed or not in the five-year interval. Rowan is particularly haunting in the contemporary scenes, displaying the pathos of a man who’s realized his inability to control either his or his brother’s fates. Baby Brother ends on an ambiguous note, but only the most optimistic viewers will be able to see a bright future for these figures beaten down by life, both literally and figuratively.