Review: 'Wasteman' is hands down the new best prison film of all time
Cal McMau’s debut delivers a terrifyingly real portrayal of survival, anchored by career-best performances
Wasteman is not just a strong directorial debut; it’s a punishing, nerve-shredding experience that reminded me what a true thriller can be.
It is no exaggeration to say it is the most terrifying and anxiety-inducing pressure cooker of a film I have ever seen.
From the first scene, director Cal McMau establishes a tone of suffocating intensity, pulling the viewer into a world that feels so relentlessly oppressive that even silence becomes unbearable.
David Jonsson plays Taylor, a man on the verge of parole after years inside, trying to keep his head down while the world outside has moved on without him.
He is a man marked by time and whose every movement carries the burden of someone who cannot afford even the smallest of missteps.
Yet just as freedom begins to become tangible for Taylor, his new cellmate, Dee (Tom Blyth), arrives and instantly upends the fragile balance.
It is here that Blyth gives the best performance of his career.
There’s something in his eyes and the speed at which his character can go from 0 to 100 that really puts you in Taylor’s shoes, who has to live with someone who can be a friend or a ticking time bomb at any given moment.
Jonsson captures that exhaustion beautifully, playing Taylor with this dreadful, quiet longing and as someone who’s learned that silence is survival.
It’d be criminal (pun intended) to not give Alex Hassell and Corin Silva their flowers as they bounce off each other flawlessly to deliver both the film’s scariest and funniest moments without ever tipping into caricature, making every exchange feel dangerously real.
McMau’s direction is claustrophobic and precise, with every frame designed to make you feel trapped.
The decision to keep the camera tightly framed, rarely offering an escape from the walls around the characters, makes the experience almost unbearably tense.
The cinematography is documentary-style, shaky but purposeful, grounding the film in a realism that feels too raw to be staged.
Sprinkled throughout the film are these cutaways to phone-recorded footage from the prisoners or still shots of inside the prison that really help flesh out the world and sell the fact that these characters exist outside of the scenes.
The score is one of the most harrowing I’ve heard, and it’s used sparingly enough that your own heartbeat becomes the soundtrack.
Equally powerful is the editing that lets moments linger longer than is comfortable, forcing the audience to sit with every consequence and again selling the audience on the continued existence of these people.
Eoin Doran pens this film’s airtight screenplay, where every line of dialogue is a domino, precisely set up to fall later and then even later come together to form the greatest twist ending I’ve ever seen.
As much as Wasteman aims to thrill, it would be impossible to do so without the tragic tale of brotherhood that is baked into the film’s DNA.
You have these two very different men on very different paths that form this unlikely bond out of circumstance, yet their friendship gets in the way of those goals before succumbing to those goals.
One scene seems to be a joke, yet as it goes on, this uncomfortable gut feeling starts to creep in as a character is hit with reality, leaving the audience complicit in their own laughter.
Ironically, I think this film could’ve also been called One Battle After Another, as Taylor’s journey through the film is a brutal cycle of small wins that somehow still end up with him at a bigger loss than he started.
To me, this was a great choice thematically, as offenders are often from disadvantaged backgrounds that lead them into offending and, eventually, prison, where simply getting by is a challenge.
Once inside, they are forced to do whatever they can to survive, and that’s before even considering how readjusting to life outside can be like one setback after another.
I rarely think people should be urged to see a film, but Wasteman needs to be at the top of everyone’s list of things to watch next year.
It’s a film that weaponises realism to terrifying effect in both its thematic messages and the technical makeup of the film.
Cal McMau has crafted something that feels both cinematic and deeply human, a story that lingers long after the screen fades to black and gives Shawshank Redemption a worthy retirement.
Wasteman hits cinemas 20th February 2026.