Small Town Hero is a 2019 drama about an idyllic rural town in England where a local man becomes a hero after taking the law into his own hands.
You can probably relate to the fury seizing poor Pep (Simon Cassidy), a contributing resident of the small pastoral English town of Hewson, who has had enough of the shenanigans running amok in his little corner of the world. But maybe unlike you, he’s going to do something about it. Writer and director Darren Bolton‘s latest Small Town Hero explores vigilantism through the eyes of a contorted sort of man hell bent to stop even the most petty of ‘crimes,’ at least in his eyes, standing proud on his sand castle moral high ground while his actions escalate.
As such, this becomes a scathing satire filmed as a kind of reality show documentary where a camera crew follows Pep around shortly after he becomes a local celebrity, once chasing off a group of troublemaking teens breaking shop windows. It ignites in him a new mission to clean up the streets where he lives, starting off with litterbugs and such before steadily finding new targets to direct his anger. From parking in the wrong spaces to trash in the front yard to squabbles on the corner, Pep feels himself a superhero, using violence and intimidation to do what the police won’t. Urged by the documentary crew that seem to fuel his action, he soon pushes the town against him, including the local neighborhood watch team who vote him out.
Wrapped in his own dark hubris, Pep is a volatile presence, twisted into a manic mess, convinced his hometown is rotting out from underneath, though Bolton is careful not to squeeze him too tightly into the shadows, letting his rage not just shape him into an unfocused monster but leave him a man deeply affected by the work he does. Like when he berates a woman for a cluttered front yard, then suddenly offers to help clean it up … and then buys her a lawn gnome as decoration, a kind of trophy for his efforts.
Meanwhile, there’s a rumor about that a pedophile has moved into Hewson and Pep takes it upon himself to root the suspect out, slipping into a kind of obsessed hysteria, harassing new members of the community and even using his own son as ‘bait’ to lure out the criminal seed. Bolton balances the inherent horror of such an endeavour with ebony black comedy as Cassidy delivers an absolutely caustic performance. He plays Pep like a lit stick of dynamite bouncing around a tin of gunpowder, yet what makes it so memorable is how brittle he truly feels, seeming like a man trapped in a hole slowly filling in with concrete.
At the heart of this is Pep’s own broken family, with his seven-year-old son Billy (Harrison Ainslie) torn between his father and his mother (Millie Reeves), she pregnant with her new boyfriend. Pep wants only to protect them, even as he seems sometime only to be a danger. Pep’s not a bad guy but he’s tied himself into such a knot, he can’t be anything but toxic, even as he struggles to do good. The film often cuts away from him and gets commentary from locals who offer their thoughts on his increasingly disturbing behavior, and you begin to see a kind of frog in the hot water metaphor where no one knows how bad it’s gotten until it’s too late. And oh how bad it gets.
Small Town Hero is an independent release that transcends the found footage feel it borrows its roots from, making this a tight, sometimes nerve-racking experience that leads to a conflict you know is coming yet sucks the breath out of you either way. It’s both an incredibly well-conceived social commentary and a mesmerizing character study. But what it does best is raise questions with no easy answers. Highly recommended.