Dean Man's Shoes - threats

One of the most intensely acted scenes I can remember is the confrontation between Rich and Sonny in Shane Meadow's sometimes overlooked revenge thriller from 2004 - Dean Man's Shoes.  The film stars Paddy Considine as a British soldier who returns from action overseas to find that his younger brother has got in with the wrong people, very wrong people who have treated him very badly.  After Considine's character Rich tries to intimidate the local criminals by breaking into their leader Sonny's house at night, the gang go looking for Rich the next day.  Here, Sonny finds Rich hanging around on a street corner and tries to scare him into staying away from them...



... he utterly fails to scare him in the slightest, instead backing off himself in realisation that he's dealing with someone who holds no fear of his criminal underclass.  I have fond memories of the film as I saw it at Nottingham's Broadway cinema when it originally came out.  It was then and remains now quite rare to see films set in the East Midlands with actors doing appropriate accents.  Plus the film has a masterful final twist.

For anyone who thinks the East Midlands doesn't have its own accent that's distinct from the West Midlands or South Yorkshire - it does, and this is it.  Though most conversations people have up there generally don't involve this much posturing.