WHAT an extraordinary debut. Andrea Arnold has just three short films to her name, yet her first feature is a hot contender for the most coveted trophy in Cannes.

Red Road is a tough and grainy piece of suspense. It’s also the name of a wintry council estate in Glasgow, patrolled by a lonely security officer who spies on the locals through CCTV cameras. Banks of screens in Jackie’s office reveal a host of silent dramas. A middle-aged man nurses his sick old bulldog to the shops every day. A teenage girl is chatted up by a pair of men outside a lock-up. A couple copulate on a patch of wasteland. A child is stabbed under a lamppost. At the end of her shift, Jackie returns to her flat, as seemingly cut-off from the world as the footage she tapes at work.

The iron grip of the film is the intensity of Jackie’s bottled emotions. The tiny clues are etched on her face, and meticulously documented by Arnold as if Jackie herself was under investigation.

There is grief for a dead husband. An empty affair with a married colleague. And profound shock when Jackie discovers a fearful ghost from the past living in a Red Road tenement. We have no idea who this ginger-haired stranger is, or what he’s done, until Jackie starts stalking him with her cameras, and, more alarmingly, following him home from the pub. She becomes, in effect, another character in this closed-circuit world.

A majestic performance by Kate Dickie as Jackie underpins an icy thriller that explores in squirming close-up the indescribable pain of loss, and the reckless power of revenge. The ingredients might look as spare as the way the film is shot. But the awful intimacy between Jackie and Tony Curran’s magnetic, unsuspecting ex-con, is a thing of terrible beauty.

What’s impressive is how much great cinema Arnold has clearly absorbed from directors such as Ken Loach (also in competition with The Wind that Shakes the Barley). She is half the reason why the Brits might scoop their first big Cannes prize for years.

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