The film is about a fifteen-year-old girl. It seems that this girl is stuck in a world of war with her family. This family is still ambitious, especially this girl who shows her passion for life with hip-hop. Now, the dream must be kept secret until you meet a new man and show her a wonderful and distinctive dance.
The characters are guarded, and as we come to understand them scene by scene, they become ever harder to sort into convenient categories of hero and villain.
[Andrea] Arnold has a knack for subtle details but also for portraying female characters whose natural warmth and energy have been muted by trauma or social isolation.
The film is remarkable for its depth. It's not drilling in a message about the hopelessness of poverty, nor is it stylising the lifestyle of those living on council estates.
Writer-director Andrea Arnold has created something so real and raw, you may come away with a twinge of guilty voyeurism, a sense of peering too closely and impolitely into other people's lives.
Plenty of films have presented us with the Angry Young Man but not so many with the Angry Young Woman ...Andrea Arnold does her bit to help correct this imbalance with Fish Tank...
Fish Tank may begin as a patch of lower-class chaos, but it turns into a commanding, emotionally satisfying movie, comparable to such youth-in-trouble classics as The 400 Blows.
