A tough tale of growing up

On a continuum, with the brutally abused teenager of Precious at one end and the almost genteel (by comparison) coming-of-age story of An Education at the other, Andrea Arnold's extraordinarily tough Fish Tank sits somewhere in the middle - perhaps inching closer to Precious, given Arnold's unflinching examination of a troubled 15-year-old's hard slog toward adulthood.

Set in and around a stark public housing high-rise in Essex, east of London, Fish Tank stars the untrained, and unforgettable, newcomer Katie Jarvis as Mia Williams - a scowling, solitary soul who lives with her younger sister (Rebecca Griffiths) and their mother (Kierston Wareing) in a flat overlooking industrial parks, marshlands, and a giant wind turbine not far from the Thames estuary. It's a landscape of dramatic contrasts: big blue skies and thrumming highways, tidy suburban homes and derelict buildings, empty lots and idle kids up to no good. (Robbie Ryan's cinematography is spectacular.)

Mia, with her Discman and her hoop earrings, wants nothing to do with her peers - or with her mother or bratty sibling, for that matter. Mia and her best friend no longer talk (Mia greets her with a violent head-butt). Instead, Mia steals booze and shuts herself in her room, dancing to hip-hop, breaking and spinning in her own private world.

And then Joanne - Mum - brings home a new beau, a guy named Connor (Hunger's Michael Fassbender), and everything changes. Arnold, whose slow, tense Glasgow revenge thriller Red Road won the jury prize at the 2006 Cannes festival, suggests where things might go with an early scene: Connor and Joanne return from an evening of partying to find Mia laid out, apparently asleep. He picks the teenager up and takes her to her bed, removing her sneakers and her sweatpants before covering her with a blanket. Innocent enough?

Not really. We see Mia watching through half-open eyes. She breathes in her mother's lover as if he were her own.

It would be unfair to reveal much more of Fish Tank's plot, which tracks Mia as she moves from (perhaps) ingenuous flirtation, to friendship, to manipulation, to something else - and something potentially terrible and tragic. But like the best of the 1960s British New Wave - the kitchen-sink dramas by Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, and Tony Richardson that have clearly influenced Arnold - Fish Tank digs around in its protagonist's psyche, unafraid to explore.

It's oppressive and claustrophobic, confused and scary in there. But it's also compellingly real.EndText