Wow...<br /><br />It's been twelve hours since the closing credits rolled and I am still processing my experience of Dead Man's Shoes.<br /><br />"Experience" is certainly the right word; this film puts the viewer through a wide range of emotions, and by the end I felt exhausted, stunned, and numbed. That sounds bad, but as strange as it may sound, I mean those things in a good way.<br /><br />Dead Man's Shoes is genuinely funny, thanks to flawless deadpan delivery of brilliantly-written naturalistic dialogue. The whole film has a documentary feel about it (one minor flaw, I felt, was the overuse of shaky hand-held camera-work) but it is, at times, beautiful to look at, with lingering shots and slow edits giving it a strangely dreamlike quality. The beautiful musical score, consisting mainly of lo-fi acoustic rock and folk, enhances that sense of melancholy isolation.<br /><br />The entire cast deliver wonderful, believable performances, grounded firmly in reality. Considine, playing the vengeful returned soldier, is alternately pitiful and terrifying, with veins of pitch black humour running throughout. Kebbell, as his developmentally-delayed little brother, delivers what is simply one of the best portrayals of an intellectually disabled character ever filmed. His performance is subtle and utterly convincing.<br /><br />Dead Man's Shoes is not without flaws, but they are relatively minor. The overly-wobbly camera has already been mentioned, but its biggest problem is probably its unsatisfying final act. Compared to the film that precedes it, the finale feels underdeveloped and flat. Still, it delivers a gut-punch of an ending that left me feeling slightly winded.<br /><br />This is an amazing film. It is very dark and violent in parts, but its subject matter - family, justice, loyalty, and revenge - are universal. I cannot recommend it highly enough.