Dead Man’s Shoes (2004)

directed by Shane Meadows

Daniel Appleby

I pause the film and lean against the wall.

“Oh my god,” she says.

"Yeah," I respond. “That was rough.”

“It was real.”

*

“God will forgive them. He’ll forgive them and allow them into Heaven. I can’t live with that.”

I have a fascination with violence in media: movies, literature, etc. It has also mellowed out in recent years. I’ve been told to focus on more positive aspects in both life and movies. Can’t say I disagree; in fact, I’m thankful for the new development. But it won’t leave me. I’ve made my peace with that fact.

My fascination dates back to when I was five years old and accidentally walked in on my two older brothers watching the final scene in Saw III (2006), in which Angus Macfadyen slices Tobin Bell’s neck with a power saw. As much as my older brother denies that ever happening, I remember the blood gushing out of Jigsaw’s throat like leaked oil. I turned out fine, worryingly enough. After many stray encounters, the obsession fully blossomed after I watched Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) during my second year at university on my professor’s recommendation. Such a nightmarish rabbit hole that veered on the edge of grindhouse cinema excited the little black hole in my intestines.

However, I’m not a sadist. Exploitation films rarely appeal to me. I’ve never delved into them. A friend of mine recently watched the dreaded Guinea Pig films and finished them with a straight face and a shrug. I could never. Innocent people being hurt makes me sick. Killing bad people for entertainment, or if the “innocent” character has no personality, however, was all well and good with me. Meat bags to the faceless slaughter conducted by the likes of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and even John Wick.

That’s where my shortcomings came in. 

Simply, I saw violence as a shallow tool to use, providing a river of blood; a literary meaning was secondary, but it wasn’t always important to me. It’s why I became hyperfixated on the genre of the revenge tragedy during one of my university modules. Reading plays about conspiracy, financial espionage, empires falling apart because a king was lonely one night, incest, betrayal, more incest, and metaphysical punishments, etc., was fun and very literary! And everyone kind of deserved it!

The revenge tragedy is what Dead Man’s Shoes adopts, with an admittance to taking notes and flair from old Westerns. After listening to Mark Kermode refer to it as a comparison in his review of Kill List, I hopped on Box of Broadcasts to find it. I sat myself down excitedly and prepared myself for a great time.

It ripped my heart out and ate it in front of me, leaving me both astounded and hollow.

*

“Yeah, it is. I like how the bullies aren’t even that threatening. They don’t make conspiracies. They’re not even that smart. They’re just pathetic, cowardly rats, you know?” I say.

“It’s not just the bullies, it’s the environment around them.”

“It’s barely alive.” 

“This place, Matlock was it? There were police, a bustling community, people who cared, and now the interior matches the thugs' depravity. Littered with pornography, drugs…it’s Kenopsia incarnate.”

“What? Is that a made-up word?”

“No! It’s a phenomenon. Places that were once filled with life are now suddenly barren. Nothing remains, except that some people still live there, but probably don’t work there either. People only realise the depth of their depravity once the consequences come knocking at their door.”

“In that case, it was Richard calling Herbie a cunt.”

*

“You’re the Devil.”

“I wish I fucking was.”

Anthony, Richard’s brother, played impeccably by Toby Kebbell, was and still is the most heart-wrenching tragedy I’ve ever witnessed on screen.

I saw a bit of myself in him. 

That naive boy who thought everyone just wanted to be friends with him and not find any excuse to make him the bottom feeder for their elaborate, crass jokes. There’s a certain level of paranoia that has, and still does, have an effect on me, which is the fear of saying something that, while well-intentioned, turns out to be either rude, awkward, or even worse, offensive, without clocking it. I can recall one instance in which I was somehow convinced to flip off my mother. I got smacked in the rear end for that, and I couldn’t understand why. The individual who got me to do it, however, was laughing his socks off.

Thankfully, I was never forced to ingest LSD, or be dragged across the outskirts of a castle ruin with a rope tied to my neck like disgruntled cattle; the point still stands.

It does seem like sometimes people see us as punching bags, easy targets. I’ve been called the R-slur in school; a shallow, challenged mimic who never possessed a single independent thought. 

Growing up neurodivergent, I was always having interventions for Asperger’s syndrome, and when I was eventually diagnosed, shortly afterwards, it was no longer Asperger’s. Now it was ASD, my case specifically, High Functioning Autism. It’s strange not having a name for your condition. I still say that I have Asperger’s out of instinct when asked. It’s what I grew up with. In one scenario, I was corrected on the internet by one: “You’re not Asperger’s, you’re just autistic, get it right.” As if I’m incapable of knowing myself.

Demeaned all the time, it regrettably caused me to develop violent fantasies, dreams where I suddenly have an increase in strength and I pound my bullies into dust, smack their heads across the road and strangle them until their throats become blue and numb. So during my first watch of Dead Man’s Shoes, I was happy that the gang felt genuine fear.

*

There’s a particular scene in the film where, after the gang’s leader Sonny accidentally shoots Big Al—who had been sent in to bribe and coax Richard out in the open—Herbie, Soz, and Sonny look dejected and worthless as Tuff frantically tells them that the engine to their car has died. Usually, these people are cackling to themselves, swearing blindly at the clouds, but there’s a long, melancholic, forlorn silence in their faces. 

It's raining, and the grey British clouds loom over them. They know their fate. 

That’s how I wanted them to feel. Isolated, alone, and especially confused.

They soon return to their humble abode, Sonny, Herbie, and Soz, Tuff having run off in a hysterical fit. We watch the three losers plod about their homes, paranoid, checking upstairs and downstairs, bathroom and bedroom, kitchen and back door in hopes Richard isn’t about. It’s the scenes moving forward where my doubt begins to seep through. You’d think, after Richard deliberately drugs the gang, that he’d simply kill them then and there. But he doesn’t. Richard reduces the three into an almost childlike, vegetative state, slapping them, spitting in their faces, and treating them like disobedient dogs who failed at the necessities of living. Worst of all? Despite my stomach turning due to Richard’s cruelty, I went along with it. These guys were bad, I reasoned; feed them their medicine.

The dreaded intimacy that Meadows depicts through the lucid, discombobulated cinematography, with flashes of the three sweaty, distressed faces, combined with occasional deranged snapshots of Paddy Considine smiling, staring, and systematically stripping them of their ability to think properly, is no more depraved than they are. The music swings between nursery rhyme lullabies and static intrusion, lost in the uncanny, naked scene. Richard is a monster, and he is loving it. Watching the scene again, it serves as an excellent encapsulation of a feverish nightmare. They cower at the sight of him; he taunts them, brands them with the same horror they inflicted on Anthony. 

“You’d think you get away with it.” 

*

Their deaths are all swift and ignored: Sonny gets a plastic bag over the head and is shot like nothing, while Soz is dead on impact by Richard’s vicious strike.

Except for Herbie. 

Oh, Herbie. The first to encounter the beast.

Richard speaks to him like a child, asking rhetorical questions—just as some of the teachers back in my first old private primary school did after I had an outburst of anger, using that fake, sweet voice that can’t be distinguished from genuine kindness, forcing compliance out of a child who couldn’t understand his emotions. It’s fascinating how a seemingly warm, friendly tone can morph into a threat. Stuart Wolfenden deserves all the praise for rendering Herbie completely defenceless, which only emphasises Richard’s cruelty and the way Herbie pleads for some unspoken, unmarked forgiveness as Richard lulls him into a false sense of security. 

Sure, if you’re overly critical, you might notice how the knife isn’t bleeding when Richard pulls it from Herbie’s gut, or that Herbie himself isn’t bleeding at all, or that most of the blood budget was likely spent on Gypsy John’s off-screen axe-murder, but that’s not what makes it stand out. It’s how intimately Richard manipulates Herbie’s deteriorating schema, his helpless questions about why Richard murdered his friends, why he’s showing him the body of Tuff carelessly stuffed inside a suitcase. Herbie’s death isn’t glamorised or celebrated. Richard kills a helpless man, and that’s all there is to it. 

“You’re frightened. Do you want me to close it?”

“I’m sorry, man.”

“Yeah…it’s hard losing somebody close to you, innit? Do you want me to shut it?”

*

With the prominent gang gone, Richard chases after Mark, a member who has clearly severed ties with Sonny and his cancerous lot.

Until Richard arrives, skulking at their house like a worn predator. 

Having followed his children and given them a knife and a gas mask to take home, Mark, understandably concerned, heads to the park with his kids to try and find this stranger, leaving his wife, Marie, alone. 

You immediately fear the worst. 

I started to feel cold: Richard, no, not her; she’s innocent. I was trying to plead with Richard not to bring her to harm telepathically. It’s ironic, isn’t it? He sneaks to the front door, knocks, and grins when Marie opens it. I held my breath: No.

Richard simply tells her he’s a friend of Mark's and that his brother's name is Anthony.

The entire conversation between them made my skin crawl. There are enough moments of awkward silence and the ambiguous nature of Richard’s politeness, I was theorising, no, certain, that he was going to rush her and hold her hostage, let Mark return to see her strung up, bleeding like a pig. We have the worst imaginations as humans when the answer is laden with layers of ambiguity.

I breathed out uneasily when Richard began to walk away slowly: Thank you, thank you, she’ll be fine, she’ll be fine, I repeated to myself.

“You’re a good mother.”

“Yeah…Yeah, I am a good mother.”

“A good mother.”

“I’m - sorry, can I ask your name again?”

“My name’s Richard.”

“And…and I’ll just tell him that you called then, yeah?”

“Yeah, I’ll be around anyway.”

“Right, okay.”

“Anthony’s brother.”

I wanted to stop the film. Perhaps by pausing, I could stop Richard. I could stop the possibility of Mark’s wife and kids being killed. Again, ironic. A wave of guilt and despair flooded my head. I can’t believe this, I thought aloud. I couldn’t, yet I did. It’s like telling a fire to stop spreading to a field of dry grass. I ignited the flame of passionate slaughter by pressing the play button and wishing for more, and more, and more. Violence isn’t a toy. It’s a dreadful answer when the tether to humanity is cut.

I must appreciate the realistic, fragmented manner in which the characters speak. The dialogue, with the two-word reminder of saying “Anthony’s brother,” without the “I am.” It’s proof of this film’s almost guerrilla film production, with both Considine and Meadows writing the dialogue on a single sheet of paper and improvisation being rampant. It constructs these beautiful scenes of uneasy conversations, misheard interruptions, and double-meanings in seemingly innocuous sentences. I’d be here forever if I could write my love for all of them down. Personally, it hits close to home. There have been conversations I’ve either endured or initiated, and words, which aren’t really words that correspond to my ear, seem to float and quickly die like a fly’s accelerated lifespan.

*

The ending still gets me. Richard reveals that he secretly hated his brother due to his disability, performing an offensive mockery of his mannerisms, mocking his speech patterns, and outright calling Anthony a “spastic.” I can recall being called that a few times. It somehow feels dirtier and worse, and coming from hard-man Richard, it looks downright pathetic. And he knows this. Richard’s mockery and his anger towards Anthony finally makes him vulnerable. The monster’s skin is torn off by himself, and all that is left is a decrepit shell of a man. The twitching mouth, the destroyed eyes, Richard is gone; this crusade has meant nothing.

He coerces a sobbing Mark to kill him and let him join his brother. Considine’s eyes are so expressive and intense, the sudden twitch of his face when he admits to Mark that he can still hear Anthony screaming his name. It was in that slow linger on Richard’s unmoving body, bleeding on the cold, harsh dirt floor, that I saw everything.

I saw myself, my brothers, my acquaintances, and enemies all mashed into one as the Gothic choir pierced my speakers. The grit, like salt, tears from our fingertips, fingernails, and the pain finally reveals itself, unimaginable, and just as it actualises its white hot pain, it falls apart into forgetful dust of a brick wall.

The tagline for this movie is simple: 

HE’S IN ALL OF US.

Once the credits began to roll, I said, “Rest easy…You’ve done enough.” I’m glad that the he in question has been quarantined.

*

It’s no surprise when I say that Dead Man’s Shoes is less of a bloodfest and more of a deeply moralistic anti-revenge film that explores themes of brotherhood, lost, guilt and rage, in a seemingly timeless capsule of rural North England where Richard’s base instincts are medieval, taking the law into his own hands to dish out justice, wrath, whatever happy little adjective describes curb-stomping your peer’s face onto the pavement.

What will be surprising is that, despite needing a cold shower, my first desire was to re-watch the film. I knew it had shifted my view immensely. My thoughts, dreams, those had been extinguished; the violence meant nothing in the end. Gazing at that isolated town from a bird’s-eye view, I realised that this entire journey was no different to those small, desensitised columns in the local paper, something to be gazed at and simply forgotten. I needed to reconsider how I viewed such violent works. Meanings are meaningful. Blood can be fun, occasionally. That’s where Dead Man’s Shoes shines in its black and bleak light.

It made me hollow, yes. But in that vacuum, new understandings filled in the space.

As my dear friend told me, and again when I messaged her about her thoughts while writing this, the realisation of one’s depravity is only recognised and understood when the consequences come to you. I said it was Richard calling Herbie a cunt. Now? It was seeing Anthony calling out for his brother for protection and realising: he’s me, and he’s probably you, and that innocent little kid, somewhere, is inside us all.

“I don’t want to go Richard.”

“You don’t have to.”

Daniel Appleby (BA Hons) is an autistic, bass-playing writer and poet currently residing in the UK, specifically Cornwall. He has been published in The Horror Zine, Four Tulips Publishing, Discretionary Love, and numerous others. Currently, Daniel is pursuing his Master of Arts degree at Falmouth University. His Instagram is @danie_lappleby.