4 days ago
One Day in Southport review — a horrifying portrait of Britain in 2024
I am often dubious about giving more airtime to murderous, attention-seeking lowlifes such as Axel Rudakubana, the Southport child killer. But one early image from Dan Reed's weighty documentary, One Day in Southport (Channel 4), summed up the utter coward.
A taxi driver's dashcam footage showed him in a green hoodie and face mask trying to get through a door bearing the words 'pregnancy', 'yoga' and 'baby classes'. Wow, what a brave man, eh? What a warrior's legacy: walking into a community hub marked 'baby classes' and knifing little girls who are making friendship bracelets.
An abundance of CCTV, mobile phone and dashcam footage helped to make this film, about this atrocity and the UK riots it sparked, sharply immersive. From the killer in the back of a taxi, sullenly asking 'Is this 34A Hart Street?' before commencing his mass-stabbing, to wobbly, close-up footage of rioters attacking police vehicles as someone shouts 'Set the van on fire!' and others smashing the windows of small terraced houses, there was a visceral, menacing feel to it, as if you too were there amid the baying mob.
Reed, an award-winning director behind, among others, Leaving Neverland and One Day in October, chose to focus on YouTubers and others filming from within rather than the mainstream media filming from without. This gave it a more urgent, intimidating quality. 'You get what you deserve when you're protecting a f***ing mosque,' screamed one person, misinformed by social media, like so many others, that the killer was Muslim and had come here on a boat. 'I know he was born in Wales and all that, but he was of Rwandan heritage,' one interviewee said.
Wendell Daniel, who is black and a videographer for Tommy Robinson, insisted this wasn't about race but about class. But Wesley Winter, a YouTuber born to British and Korean parents, seemed to take a different view. When filming riots in Middlesbrough, he was told by a masked man: 'If you're not white you can't go through.' His wife, who is Chinese, meanwhile, was sitting in their car being terrorised by rioters who she thought were going to drag her out and beat her.
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I'm sure we can all remember the attack on a hotel housing immigrants, with rioters shouting 'Come out and fight like men'. But the film, skilfully woven and without a narrator, portrayed a sense of a country that was already a tinderbox, simmering with rage over immigration, the massacre of those little girls, the spark that detonated it: 'This is the consequence of not listening to the people.' It ended, without comment, with a clip of Keir Starmer's reference to 'an island of strangers'.
In years to come this and other films may be studied as a bellwether of British unrest in summer 2024 and afterwards. But it is still the contributions of a quietly spoken young victim who survived the stabbings and her parents that were the most unforgettable.
Whose stomach did not lurch when the girl's father (all of their identities protected) said a paramedic cut off her bloodied hoodie and 'it just looked like her muscles were inside out'? Dear god. The blade had fractured her spine and punctured her lung. Imagine the ferocity of that attack, one so vicious it left poor little Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Elsie Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, dead.
The girl in the film said she had to have a special chair at school now because the normal ones dig into her scars. What spirit and courage she has shown; what an important documentary.★★★★☆
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