Wait a minute, is that the town from that other Welsh movie about the men who sing sea shanties?
The Toll is a madcap mess of coincidence, unhappy accidents and blokes being caught with their pants down set among the majestic cliffs and rundown roads of wet, wild and woolly Wales. With a telling as off-beat as the tale piecing the events of the film together is enough to give your brain a work-out, but the film never mistakes obfuscation for depth - it’s too busy having a good time. Seeing two pieces of the jigsaw fit together is as satisfying as it’s funny, and the gags are really brought home with killer performances from its cast of misfits and wry old wisecrackers. There are some hilarious call-backs and camera tricks on display here as the film skillfully blurs homage and parody.
What I love about this film is how well it balances its disparate elements and brings them all together for a perfect landing. It has all the marks of a directorial debut up to and including a preoccupation with hitmen, but somehow Ryan Andrew Hooper manages to skip the awkward stumbling and give us something as slick as it is bursting with youthful enthusiasm. It manages to be dark without being moribund and affectionately clichéd without being anywhere close to overdone. And on top of that the script would have been just as compelling if it had been played straight.
At a sparse 82 minutes The Toll is short, sweet and somehow more intricate than a movie twice as long. See it before it makes a get-away.