Pigeon Shrine Frightfest Glasgow Review

**In Last Straw, a young woman with an unwanted pregnancy is terrorised by a masked gang while managing the graveyard shift in her father’s roadside diner.**

Disaffected 20-year-old Nancy feels trapped by her tedious job and small-town surroundings. Still grieving for her dead mother, she seeks solace in meaningless sexual encounters and weed, but ultimately she is just treading backwater in the Fat Bottomed Bistro in the arse end of nowhere. Subject to undesired stewardship of similarly disillusioned diner staff she spits petulance at them, her father, and the world in general. Gripped by an existential crisis and plagued by morning sickness, Nancy makes no bones about the fact she intends to eradicate the pesky fetus.

When a contingent of masked moped-riding morons piss her off she reacts in typically undiplomatic fashion and ejects them from the premises. After firing Jake the moody cook because of authority issues, she finds herself all alone in the diner when the douchebags return for a harrowing rematch. In attempting to create a depressing snapshot of America, Last Straw orchestrates its pitfalls and leaps onto the spikes. Director Alan Scott Neal carefully populates his film with characters on the edge of a camel’s back break, only to have the spinal snap muffled by a contrived, and needless, shift in perspective.

The photogenic Jessica Belkin is genuinely excellent as the caustic Nancy, shoehorned punky dance sequence aside, and fosters audience empathy through relatability rather than likeability. Her transformation from bird-flipping sass-pot to a frazzled final girl is not the problem here. Indeed, all the actors put a decent shift in under the neon diner sign. No, the issues lie in an over-tinkered script that can’t leave well-alone and preposterous, paradoxical narrative choices in a film that is crutching on a realist perspective. For example, Last Straw addresses the rise of male toxicity and the subsequent lack of female safety. It strives to be a microcosm of both the Andrew Tate-inspired wave of misogyny and nihilistic hopelessness currently infesting the youth of today. Yet nonsensically strands Nancy as serial killer bait.

Now, we all know the potential danger a young woman could face completely isolated in a remote location at the mercy of the general public. However, inexplicably Nancy’s father does not. He is utterly content to leave her exposed while he goes on a date. This simply would not be the mindset of a man who has recently lost his wife and jars irreparably in a movie explicitly concerned with everyday people’s propensity for violence and evil when pushed too far.

The slasher elements of the picture are underwhelming, deliberately so I suspect, but are well done and the effects work pleasingly practical. The tension aspect is workmanlike and predictable, hampered by the tiny location and diluted further by the clumsy timeline. On the plus side, the lack of clarity in the period setting is intriguing. However, the surging score from Neon Indian frontman Alan Palomo, and the lack of mobile phone interactions suggest at least a couple of decades ago. Also fascinating is the film’s inspired choice of final line. Only just understandable, it will polarise many and is a darkly humorous peek into Nancy’s ultra-cold mentality.

If only the rest of the movie that proceeds it had been so ballsy and authentic.