Ìý User Rating 
Shane O'Sullivan must hate popcorn. One imagines he sat next to some loud muncher in his local fleapit and so designed his first film as an act of vengeance on audiences. Words like tedious, creaky, and incompetent spring to mind, and that's in the better scenes.
Presumably the 31-year-old Irishman suffers from the same happy delusion as all those who believe they have a novel in them. While appreciating the freedom enjoyed by grabbing a camcorder and shooting - in his case, for the budget price of £20,000 - talent ought to have just the tiniest role to play. Freedom without talent should be made illegal. As should the ability to render Brick Lane dull. This buzzing, multicultural centre a short distance from London's Liverpool Street train station is reduced to a neon-lit backdrop in a barely coherent story about a young Chinese girl fleeing an arranged marriage in Hong Kong and washing up in Brick Lane: she is offered a coffee, and then a commercial, by an Indian commercials director, flits from one boyfriend to another, and is pursued by a Japanese detective working for her father. It is impossible to fathom why O'Sullivan thought this simpering idiot of a girl might be of interest to audiences.
Despite her experience as a performer (she is a Berlin-based Japanese pop star), Hanayo - like most other actors in this film - prefers posing for the camera to anything approaching acting. Characters vanish abruptly, only to pop up again inexplicably, and there is no risk of any pace, shape, or direction of any kind interfering with the awfulness. Yet there is a lovely night-time shot of a disused railway signal box, but that's not quite enough to sustain the whole film. Nor are Hanayo's red-and-white striped stockings, which are the only sign of life.
