Chicken Town: World Premiere

A distinctive, grounded, varied independent movie that tells a fantastic story.

‘Two school-friends join forces with a green-fingered granddad to fence a shed of weed that the old man has accidentally grown on his allotment.’

I’ve never seen a movie that can jump between comedy and grounded realism with such ease and respect.

Before saying anything else, the writing and how it’s portrayed on screen are absolutely complimentary. No matter how wacky the plot goes, it always strangely remains in the realm of possibility. This movie feels real - like there’s an actual community out there just like this. It’s rare to see a movie that captures a rural English environment so well.

The pacing works really well. Nothing ever feels like too much, which is a great achievement considering the number of characters and their motivations. It’s easy to take in what’s happening in every scene.

I loved the drip-feed of characters being introduced separately and slowly meeting each other, until they’re finally all seen together on screen towards the end of the movie. You’re always wondering who’s going to meet who next and how they’ll link with the other characters until it becomes clear and clearer. That’s really compelling storytelling.

While Jayce (Ethaniel Davy), Paula (Amelie Davies) and Kev (Graham Fellows) are growing their bond, another more emotional story is unfolding, which surrounds Lee Matthews (Ramy Ben Fredj).

Towards the start of the movie, Lee flees the scene of a crime, which Jayce ends up spending ten months in jail for. One of the first scenes is Jayce coming home from prison and meeting Lee, and it’s quickly clear that the two are friends. From there, we learn more about Lee - how life has been treating him, how guilt has made him realise his own cowardice and especially his relationship with his family.

There are moments where Lee’s story has genuine, poignant story-telling and within that story are comedic moments and time to breathe. It’s exemplary.

When asked about the movie’s creation in a subsequent Q&A session following the screening, co-producers and writers Richard Bracewell and Patrick Dalton said that the movie was originally written as the pilot to a TV series, and that they hope to be able to work on future projects. They divulged several ideas they want to explore one day, including Jayce finding a love interest.

Richard also explained how writing the characters came first, and they were changed slightly based on the characterisation they were given by the actors to improve them.

He also explained that the movie took five years to write, but that none of that time was wasted.

“We were working on it for ages,” he said.

“You’ve got to make the best script possible.

“None of that time was wasted, because we were constantly looking back at the script, adding ideas and improving it.”

Although the co-writers said that they had plans to return to this world, as a one-off movie some ideas feel incomplete. There are, unfortunately, some plot threads that don’t seem to be fully concluded.

Kev is seen on a handful of occasions video-calling his daughter, who lives on the other side of the world. The last of these calls adds nothing to the movie, and left me wondering if these scenes could be cut altogether. It feels as though they’re building up the story arc of ‘will Kev be able to reach his granddaughter’s birthday in another country on time’, but we never get that answer and never see the result. The first video call helps to demonstrate Kev’s small social circle - he is phoning up his daughter to tell her something ‘funny that happened at work today’ despite the fact he doesn’t work anymore, and just checked back on his old work friends to see how they were doing. Past that, this plot thread lingered and was largely anticlimactic.

One of the first scenes shows Jayce buying a new motorbike from the mechanic character played by Laurence Rickard (Horrible Histories). This is an incredibly good scene to have early on, and it got a lot of laughs and attention from the audience I was with. It sets up characters for later and the importance slowly grows as the movie goes on. There is a theme introduced which you’d imagine would be recurring, but it surprisingly fizzles out pretty quickly. Around the office of the mechanic are conspiracy slogans such as ‘Birds Aren’t Real’ and posters like the ‘all-seeing eye’. The mechanic claims that the Illuminati control everything, to which Jayce replies “I’m going to find them.” What happened to that? What did that mean? Why did he say that?

As well as this, I was very surprised to see the movie stray from the actual synopsis. There is a moment in the first half of the movie where we see just how much weed that Kev has inadvertently grown - enough to fill a freezer and a shed - but as far as we know, it’s still there. We’re introduced to a ‘Mr Green’ character, who Jayce and Paula plan to sell the weed to, but he only appears once, and only a small sampling of weed is sold. None of the other weed is sold or seen again, and the shed itself is only shown in two scenes. I say every other plot thread gets more screen time and attention than the ‘drug-dealing children and grandpa’ one.

Although the actual weed subplot could be considered underdeveloped, there is a lot of joy to be gotten from these scenes. As well as the laughs, these scenes demonstrate one of the underlying themes of the movie - reconnecting the younger generation and the older generation. So much of that is down to perfect characterisation by Graham Fellows, Ethaniel Devy and Amelie Davies. The latter two command the scenes they’re in and create a relatable, likely friend group which builds up a realistic bond with the fantastic Kev.

There is real, genuine importance in this movie. Even after becoming properly engrossed in these characters and the themes present in the movie, I keep on thinking that there are deeper meanings that will register with me on a rewatch.