Wasteman is a particularly ingenious prison drama, though in many respects it ticks the usual boxes: hyper-masculinity, bullying, drugs, a top dog bossing the show with the tacit assent of the authorities, a rookie prisoner falling foul of said top dog. And this being the 21st century, drones and phones very important.
Since the high concept seems preordained, the emphasis on detail is massively important. And casting is crucial – think of Jack O’Connell, remarkable in Starred Up. Or the equally important Tahar Rahim in A Prophet. And Shawshank, of course.
Here there are really only five roles that matter. David Jonsson as Taylor, a meek prisoner on the last leg of a long sentence who will get out soon if he can keep his nose clean and stay off the drugs. Tom Blyth as Dee, Taylor’s new and probably psychopathic cellmate who’s going to make those last weeks in prison ones fraught with danger. Alex Hassell as Paul, current top dog and a bad man to cross, and Corin Silva as his yes-man lieutenant. And Paul Hilton as the screw who knows when to look the other way and when to call in back-up.
There are complications, the most obvious of which is that Taylor isn’t as clean as he says he is. In fact he’s up to his eyeballs in synthetic opioids most of the time. Which puts him in hock to Paul, who supplies all the prisoners’ druggie needs. All fine and dandy until Dee arrives on the wing and decides he’s going to challenge Paul’s position. As Dee’s reluctant cellmate, Taylor is now a piggy caught in the middle, intimidated into helping with his plan by Dee’s threats against his son.
The Safdie brothers were going to direct this production of Hunter Andrews and Eoin Doran’s screenplay. Instead they went off to make Uncut Gems. It’s easy to see what the Safdies liked – Taylor’s loss of control over his own life and his increasingly desperate attempts to regain it are similar to the situation of Adam Sandler’s character in Uncut Gems, a modern classic.
Here, debut director Cal McMau does interesting things with his staging. There are lead characters – the five named above – and their scenes he stages in familiar ways. For the rest he goes after a kind of impressionistic soup of prison life, conjured using ex-cons as extras and cameras that roam about harvesting atmosphere. Against these atmospherics, scenes play out between the key players, permutating away, while the spice and hothouse masculinity, intimidation, pecking orders, boredom and claustrophobia simmer away as a backdrop.
This background/foreground approach is an inventive way of making a movie on the cheap, and in next to no time – 18 days in Shepton Mallet Prison and it was done.
They are a superb cast – the extras too, who really give it authenticity – but the two leads, Jonsson and Blyth, are where the real plaudits must be laid. Jonsson was the star of Rye Lane a couple of years ago and here, again, there is a touching vulnerability to his portrayal of Jackson. Blyth is already on the way to all sorts of stardom and here his performance as the frightening Dee will just nudge him further along.
As for director McMau, this is a significant feature debut and after 15 years of making commercials and music videos it looks like he’s about to leave that world behind. Another feature, for Netflix, beckons. And after that, who knows?
Wasteman – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
