A desperate teenager is drawn into a perilous criminal network in an affecting drama that reflects a real-life scandal
“County lines” is slang for a new UK crime phenomenon that is basically as old as the hills: the targeting of vulnerable teenagers from the big city, generally ones absent from school and without stable family support, and using them to traffic drugs out to the provinces via solo train journeys – an invisibly discreet method – and then traffic the resulting cash back. It’s about drug mules, those age-old human beasts of burden, and about using children as the disposable footsoldiers of crime, which Dickens would have recognised. Henry Blake’s debut movie about all this, developed from a short made in 2017, is focused, compassionate and well-acted: a shocking social-realist drama-thriller.
The victim-hero is 14-year-old Tyler (played by Conrad Khan) who lives at home with his mum Toni (Ashley Madekwe) and kid sister. He’s been excluded from school for fighting (Toni was once in trouble while a pupil at the same school) and crucially emboldened to do this by an earlier bullying incident in a chicken shop, when a total stranger stepped in to help him.