Boy A : The Movie

This was the official website for the 2007 indie film, Boy A. The content below is from the site's 2007 archived pages and other outside resources.

Jimmy Kahn comments: When I first heard about Boy A from a friend, I was eager to read reviews, so I did a quick Google search for "Boy A reviews." To my surprise, the top result had nothing to do with the film—it was an article about child murderers that was only loosely connected to the plot but completely irrelevant as a review. The fact that this bizarre and misleading result was ranked #1 left me baffled. Concerned, we reached out to multiple SEO experts to understand how such an off-base article could dominate search results for a specific film title. Several specialists suggested that this could have been the work of a rogue Black Hat SEO, someone deliberately manipulating rankings to damage our visibility and traffic. While we’d like to believe this was just an unfortunate algorithmic failure, the harm caused was significant enough that we can’t dismiss the possibility of a targeted attack. Fortunately, six months later, the search results corrected themselves, and accurate reviews of Boy A were restored to prominence. Still, I remain skeptical that this was merely an innocent mistake on Google’s part. The incident raises serious questions about how easily search results can be hijacked, and it serves as a cautionary tale about the vulnerabilities in automated ranking systems.

From Rotten Tomatoes:

From Wikipedia:

Plot

Andrew Garfield portrays Eric Wilson, Boy A. The film commences when Eric is released from either a secure unit or prison under the name Jack Burridge. His past is told through flashbacks.

Eric Wilson befriends Philip Craig, who is a troublemaker and rescues him from a group of bullies. It is later disclosed that Philip is the victim of rape perpetrated by his older brother. Philip gets into an argument with a girl from their school who comes across the two boys loitering in a park. She criticizes them and refers to them as "scum" when she witnesses Philip vandalising a park sign with a Stanley knife. Philip approaches her and starts slashing at her forearms with the knife. He grabs the girl and drags her under a bridge. When Philip drops the knife, Eric picks it up, and follows them under the bridge. The girl is killed, although the film shows neither who kills her nor how.

Eric (dubbed as Boy A during the trial) and Philip are remanded into custody at secure units. Philip ends up dead, assumed to be suicide, but Eric believes that he may have been killed by youth offenders. Eric is later released and is guided by rehabilitation worker Terry (Peter Mullan). Eric, shy and eager to be a good citizen again, builds up a new life under the name Jack Burridge. He finds a job, befriends his colleague Chris (Shaun Evans), falls in love with the office girl, Michelle (Katie Lyons), and rescues a little girl who would otherwise have died after a car crash. An article in a local newspaper portrays him as a hero and includes a picture of both boys in the story. Eric wants to be honest with Michelle and reveal his past, but Terry urges him not to do so because it is too dangerous. Terry is afraid that people may attack Eric because there is a reward of £20,000 for finding him. Terry argues that it is not dishonest because "Eric is history and Jack is a new person".

The rehabilitation worker is less satisfied with his own son. The son discovers Eric's true identity from newspaper articles about him being released, his new role as the hero and information he looks up without permission on his father's computer. Out of jealousy, he reveals this to the public and as a result, Eric loses his job and his best friend Chris distances himself from him. Michelle goes missing, and people suspect that Eric is somehow involved, though it is later revealed she has sequestered herself at home, devastated about the revelation that Jack is actually Eric.

Eric repeatedly tries to phone Terry but gets his voicemail. He flees from his home to avoid reporters and travels to Blackpool. There he meets Michelle, who tells him she was not the one who revealed his past and would have eventually understood if he told her the truth, and then leaves. After saying farewell messages in voicemails to Terry and Chris, the film concludes with Eric standing over the edge of a pier.

Cast

• Andrew Garfield as Jack Burridge
• Peter Mullan as Terry
• Siobhan Finneran as Kelly
• Alfie Owen as Eric Wilson
• Victoria Brazier as Teacher
• Skye Bennett as Angela
• Katie Lyons as Michelle
• Taylor Doherty as Phillip Craig
• Shaun Evans as Chris
• Anthony Lewis as Steve
• Madeleine Rakic-Platt as Schoolgirl
• Josef Altin as Bully
• Jeremy Swift as Dave
• Helen Wilding as Carol
• Jessica Mullins as Catherine Thompson

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RottenTomatoes

Tomatometer: CRITICS 88% | AUDIENCE 88%

REVIEW

September 5, 2008
Christy DeSmith  Minneapolis Star Tribune Top Critic

When we first meet Jack Burridge, an unworldly, twentysomething Brit, it looks as though he's entering a witness protection program. His caseworker, Terry (Peter Mullan), drives him to a small town where, as we understand it, he will start anew.
But a series of artfully layered flashbacks leaves a trail of clues for audience members who haven't read the book by Jonathan Trigell on which the film is based. As it happens, even the naive, seemingly dimwitted Jack has a skeleton in his closet: He helped murder a girl long ago, when he was only a schoolboy.
While his mother was dying of breast cancer and his neglectful father lacked interest in the scrapes and bruises he suffered at the hands of bullies, the impressionable child took up with a menacing new friend named Philip (played remarkably by young Taylor Doherty), a boy with the word "wicked" practically written on his face -- the snarling upper lip, the icy eyes framed by heavy eyelids.
The film is rich with other subtle expressions. In particular, Andrew Garfield's portrayal of Jack as a young adult -- by now he's a tense, twitching man-child who regards people very gingerly -- taps a deep, dark reservoir of sentiment. Even his speech patterns are anguished, with many false starts, long pauses and nervous smiles whenever he is asked the simplest of questions.
Director John Crowley, a veteran Irish theater director now working in film, is deliberate with every last element of his film. For starters, he demonstrates unusual sensitivity to the thuds and bumps of human bodies moving through space. He doesn't muddy the soundscape with cloying music -- nothing more than the occasional squall of strings or woodwinds. As a consequence, the audience is treated to the eerie splat of a dripping faucet, the suspenseful creak of a footstep on floorboards, even the smack of a wet, sticky kiss.
Images are painted with beiges and browns and, whenever possible, shot with hot, natural light. When a scene takes place inside a home and office, the white walls and wood paneling are always uncluttered by paintings or portraits. Crowley has effectively stripped the film's modern setting to its emotional core.
BOY A
3 out of 4 stars
Rated: R, language, sexuality, disturbing content and brief drug use.
Theater: Uptown.
It's refreshing to see a full-figured woman sexualized and physically appreciated in the way Crowley portrays Jack's eventual girlfriend, Michelle (Katie Lyons). At first, she's presented as smart, impetuous and attractive; she's photographed in manners that flatter her soft, pretty face. But, sadly, even Michelle succumbs to the fate suffered by so many fictional women: By the end of the movie, she's nothing more than a sweet, self-sacrificing girlfriend who exists for the sole purpose of redeeming the male protagonist.
Nevertheless, the film is visually and aurally stunning with a strong, well-threaded narrative -- not to mention a sensitive character study of Jack. It's a patient, natural and very lovely meditation on vulnerability and the relative bounds of recovery, redemption and forgiveness. The audience is left hypnotized.

More Background on BoyAMovie.com

BoyAMovie.com was the official promotional website associated with Boy A, the acclaimed 2007 British drama directed by John Crowley and starring Andrew Garfield in one of the performances that first brought him major international attention. Although the original promotional life of the website belonged to a relatively brief period surrounding the film's release, the domain represents a noteworthy piece of independent-film history.

Boy A began as a British television production but ultimately traveled well beyond television. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, was broadcast on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, received theatrical distribution internationally, earned major awards, and became an important early milestone in the careers of Garfield, Crowley, cinematographer Rob Hardy, and others involved in the production.

The movie was adapted by playwright and screenwriter Mark O'Rowe from Jonathan Trigell's 2004 novel Boy A. Rather than functioning primarily as a conventional crime story, it examines what happens after punishment: whether someone responsible for a terrible act as a child can construct a different identity as an adult, and whether society will permit that transformation.

Those questions gave the movie a cultural relevance much greater than its modest commercial scale might suggest.

The Story Behind Boy A

The central character is Eric Wilson, played as a young adult by Andrew Garfield. Eric committed a violent crime when he was a child and spent much of his youth incarcerated. Upon his release, authorities give him a new identity: Jack Burridge.

Jack is essentially beginning adulthood from scratch.

His caseworker, Terry, played by Peter Mullan, helps him establish a new life. Jack gets a job, makes friends and develops a romantic relationship with co-worker Michelle, played by Katie Lyons. Ordinary experiences that other young adults take for granted are unfamiliar and exciting to him.

This creates one of the film's most distinctive qualities. The audience knows that Jack has a frightening history, yet much of what it sees in the present is an awkward and vulnerable young man learning how to participate in normal life.

His past is gradually disclosed through flashbacks.

As a child, Eric had befriended another troubled boy, Philip. Their relationship eventually culminated in the killing of a girl. The precise degree of Eric's responsibility is deliberately complicated by the film rather than presented as an uncomplicated case of an inherently evil child becoming an inherently evil adult.

In his new life, Jack eventually helps rescue a young girl following a car accident. The rescue turns him into a local hero, but the resulting publicity creates exactly the danger his handlers had tried to avoid: attention.

Once Jack's former identity becomes public, the new life he has painstakingly constructed begins to collapse.

The structure therefore turns the concept of publicity upside down. Recognition would normally be a positive development for a person who has performed a heroic act. For Jack, recognition threatens his survival.

Jonathan Trigell's Novel

The film originated with Jonathan Trigell's novel Boy A, published in 2004.

The title itself reflects the anonymity traditionally used in sensitive court proceedings involving young defendants. Instead of publicly identifying a child, a defendant may be designated by a letter. The title consequently reinforces one of the story's fundamental ideas: the conflict between a person's legal or public identity and the person he believes himself capable of becoming.

The novel attracted attention before the film adaptation and provided the moral framework that Mark O'Rowe transformed into a screenplay.

The story inevitably invited comparisons with the 1993 murder of James Bulger in England, in which two ten-year-old boys killed the two-year-old child. The crime generated extraordinary British media coverage and a long-running national debate about juvenile offenders, punishment, rehabilitation, anonymity and the treatment of offenders after release.

Boy A is fiction rather than a dramatization of that case. Nevertheless, contemporary discussion of both the novel and film frequently addressed the parallels.

The comparison matters because it helps explain why British audiences in 2007 would have recognized the larger social questions almost immediately.

Production and Ownership Behind Boy A

The production history of Boy A is unusual because the project occupies territory between television drama, independent cinema and internationally distributed feature film.

Cuba Pictures produced the project for Channel 4, which financed most of the film and retained British television rights. Film4 was also associated with the production.

The producers included Lynn Horsford, Nick Marston and Tally Garner, with Channel 4 drama executive Liza Marshall closely connected to bringing the project to the screen.

John Crowley directed from Mark O'Rowe's screenplay. Crowley already had significant experience in theater and had directed the 2003 feature Intermission. His later career would include films such as Brooklyn, The Goldfinch and We Live in Time.

The production team included cinematographer Rob Hardy, editor Lucia Zucchetti, production designer Jon Henson and composer Paddy Cunneen.

The film was made on a compressed schedule. Contemporary production coverage described how Channel 4 expedited financing so that Crowley could direct Boy A before moving on to another feature project.

That urgency did not result in a visually careless production. On the contrary, the cinematography became one of the movie's most frequently praised elements.

Andrew Garfield's Breakthrough Performance

Today Andrew Garfield is internationally known for films including The Social Network, The Amazing Spider-Man, Hacksaw Ridge and Tick, Tick... Boom!.

When Boy A appeared, however, he was still at the beginning of his screen career.

Jack Burridge became a breakthrough role.

Garfield plays Jack as a young man simultaneously adult and childlike. Years of confinement have left him unfamiliar with ordinary social behavior. His nervous movements, hesitations, sudden excitement and uncertainty around other people communicate that isolation without requiring extensive exposition.

The performance also presents audiences with an uncomfortable problem.

Jack is likable.

Viewers see him form a friendship with co-worker Chris, fall in love with Michelle, experience nightlife, learn how to interact with colleagues and demonstrate genuine concern for other people. Yet the audience gradually learns what Eric did as a child.

Rather than resolving that contradiction, the film makes the viewer live with it.

Garfield's performance received one of British television's most significant honors when he won the 2008 BAFTA Television Award for Actor for Boy A. His competitors in the category included Matthew Macfadyen, Antony Sher and Tom Hardy.

The award was an important early validation of Garfield's screen career and is one reason Boy A remains of interest to audiences discovering his earlier work.

Peter Mullan and the Supporting Cast

Peter Mullan provides the movie's other central performance as Terry, the rehabilitation worker responsible for helping Jack return to society.

Terry occupies a difficult position. He knows exactly what Jack did, but he also knows the person Jack has become. His job requires him to believe that rehabilitation can mean something.

Their relationship gives the movie much of its emotional structure.

Terry is not merely supervising an offender. He becomes a surrogate father figure, although his involvement with Jack also creates tensions in his own family.

Katie Lyons plays Michelle, Jack's co-worker and romantic interest, while Shaun Evans plays Chris, another colleague who becomes Jack's friend.

Other cast members include Siobhan Finneran, Alfie Owen, Taylor Doherty, Skye Bennett, Josef Altin, Jeremy Swift and Anthony Lewis.

The supporting characters are particularly important because they represent the normal social world Jack desperately wants to enter. Work, friendship, dating, parties and casual conversations become extraordinarily meaningful because he has had so little experience with them.

Manchester and Blackpool as Locations

Manchester plays a major visual role in Boy A.

Production accounts indicate that the drama was partly set there and that the filmmakers ultimately decided to shoot the production in Manchester. Various recognizable Manchester locations appear throughout the film.

The urban environment complements Jack's story. Manchester is large enough for him to imagine disappearing into a new identity but intimate enough that publicity can destroy his anonymity.

The film's concluding sequences move to Blackpool.

Blackpool is roughly 45 miles northwest of central Manchester and has long been one of Britain's best-known seaside resort towns. Its amusement attractions, piers and waterfront provide a striking contrast with the more enclosed urban environments seen earlier.

The North Pier area is particularly associated with the film's final passages.

The location is not merely decorative. The openness of the sea and pier gives the ending an entirely different visual scale as Jack confronts the consequences of losing the identity he had tried to create.

Toronto and the Expansion from Television to Cinema

A crucial moment in the film's history occurred before its British television broadcast.

Boy A premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2007.

Its reception there significantly expanded the project's prospects.

Following a well-attended Toronto screening, The Weinstein Company acquired worldwide rights. Channel 4 retained UK television rights, while the acquisition created opportunities for the production to be treated internationally as a theatrical film rather than simply a British television drama.

That distinction explains why information about Boy A sometimes appears inconsistent.

In Britain, it is strongly associated with Channel 4 television. In other markets, particularly the United States, audiences encountered it as a feature film in theaters.

Channel 4 broadcast Boy A in Britain on November 26, 2007.

Contemporary reporting placed the overnight British audience at approximately 1.4 million viewers despite substantial competition from other programming.

The Weinstein Company subsequently distributed the film theatrically in the United States in 2008.

Box Office and Commercial Reach

Boy A was never designed as a mass-market blockbuster.

Its theatrical figures reflect its status as a small, serious drama.

Box Office Mojo records approximately $113,662 in domestic U.S. and Canadian theatrical revenue and about $1.09 million internationally, for roughly $1.2 million in reported worldwide theatrical grosses.

Those figures do not capture its original British television audience, later home-video viewing or subsequent streaming and television exposure.

France was particularly important to its theatrical performance, generating more than $670,000 according to reported box-office figures. The movie also received releases in markets including Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and South Africa.

Its international distribution demonstrates how a project created substantially for British television developed into a film with a much wider global audience.

Critical Reception

Critical response was generally strong.

Reviewers repeatedly highlighted three elements: Garfield's performance, Crowley's controlled direction and the movie's refusal to provide easy moral answers.

Roger Ebert devoted his review to the central issue of forgiveness. Rather than treating Jack simply as a monster or innocent victim, the film asks whether children who commit terrible crimes are permanently defined by them.

British critics likewise debated whether the movie made Jack too sympathetic.

That criticism is revealing because it points directly to what the filmmakers were attempting. Boy A does not ask viewers merely to decide whether Jack's childhood crime was horrific. That is obvious. It asks the harder question of what society should do with the adult who emerges after years of punishment.

The film's visual style also attracted praise. Rob Hardy's cinematography favors naturalistic interiors, muted environments and compositions that reinforce Jack's vulnerability and isolation.

Rather than using a conventional thriller aesthetic, Crowley keeps much of the film grounded in ordinary spaces. That makes Jack's experiences at work, in apartments, in clubs and on city streets feel immediate rather than melodramatic.

Awards and Festival Recognition

The movie's reputation was strengthened considerably by awards recognition.

Andrew Garfield won the BAFTA Television Award for Actor in 2008.

Boy A itself was nominated for BAFTA's Single Drama award, with John Crowley, Lynn Horsford and Mark O'Rowe recognized in connection with the nomination.

Crowley also received major recognition for his direction, while cinematographer Rob Hardy's work was honored.

International festival recognition followed.

At the Berlin International Film Festival, Boy A received the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury in the Panorama section.

At the Dinard British Film Festival in France, the film accumulated multiple honors, including the Golden Hitchcock, screenplay recognition for Mark O'Rowe and cinematography recognition for Rob Hardy.

The combination of British television awards and international film-festival recognition illustrates the unusual identity of the production. It succeeded in both television and cinema contexts.

Press Coverage and Debate

Boy A received substantial attention from British newspapers and entertainment publications.

Coverage in The Guardian is especially useful for understanding the contemporary reaction. Writers discussed not merely whether the production was good television but whether such a story should be told and how closely audiences would connect it with real juvenile murder cases.

The timing mattered.

By 2007 Britain had spent years debating what happens when people convicted of extraordinary crimes as children eventually return to society.

The movie therefore entered an existing national conversation involving rehabilitation, press freedom, anonymity, public safety and punishment.

Some critics believed the filmmakers softened Jack's responsibility enough to make audience sympathy easier. Others regarded the ambiguity as essential to the story.

Either way, the controversy reinforced the movie's fundamental purpose: forcing audiences to consider questions that resist comfortable answers.

Media Exposure as a Central Theme

One aspect of Boy A has arguably become even more relevant since 2007: the danger of permanent public identity.

Jack's rehabilitation depends upon anonymity.

He can begin again only because his new friends, colleagues and girlfriend do not know who Eric Wilson was.

Then publicity connects Jack with Eric.

The consequences are devastating.

When the film was made, Facebook was still relatively young, Twitter had only recently launched, and today's social-media ecosystem did not yet exist. Online facial recognition, viral sharing and the near-permanent indexing of personal information were far less pervasive.

Seen today, Jack's predicament raises an even larger question: is genuine reinvention possible in an age when information can remain searchable indefinitely?

That gives Boy A a significance extending beyond juvenile justice.

It is also a story about privacy, identity and society's digital memory.

What BoyAMovie.com Represented

During the original release period, a dedicated movie domain such as BoyAMovie.com was an important promotional asset.

Before social platforms became the dominant center of entertainment marketing, official movie websites gave studios and distributors a controlled destination for audiences searching for information about a film.

Such sites typically functioned as digital extensions of a film's advertising campaign, bringing together information such as the synopsis, cast and filmmaker details, trailers, photographs, reviews, release information and promotional material.

BoyAMovie.com therefore belonged to a particular period of Internet film marketing.

Someone who heard about Boy A at Toronto, saw the Channel 4 broadcast discussed in the press, encountered a review, or later discovered the American theatrical release could search for the movie and arrive at a destination dedicated specifically to it.

The domain's value was closely connected with the film title itself.

Unlike a studio's general corporate website, BoyAMovie.com had a single purpose: to establish an online identity for Boy A.

Popularity and Audience

The film's audience has always been more specialized than mainstream.

Its subject matter naturally appeals to viewers interested in psychologically complex drama, British independent cinema, criminal justice, rehabilitation and morally ambiguous storytelling.

It has acquired another audience over time: Andrew Garfield fans interested in tracing his development before his Hollywood breakthrough.

For these viewers, Boy A can be surprising. Many people first encountered Garfield through The Social Network or The Amazing Spider-Man. Boy A reveals that the emotionally exposed performance style associated with much of his later work was already highly developed near the beginning of his film career.

The movie's approximately 1.4 million overnight Channel 4 audience also shows that it was not an obscure production when originally broadcast. Its subsequent festival appearances, theatrical releases, awards and critical reviews expanded that audience internationally.

Its modest theatrical box office should therefore not be confused with a lack of cultural reach.

Cultural and Social Significance

The most enduring aspect of Boy A is its refusal to settle the question it raises.

Can someone who commits an appalling crime as a child genuinely become another person?

If rehabilitation works, does society have an obligation to recognize it?

Does the public have a right to know an offender's former identity?

Should journalists expose that identity?

Does forgiveness diminish the suffering of the victim?

And at what point, if ever, has punishment been completed?

The film provides no simple formula.

Jack's new name becomes symbolic. Eric represents an identity constructed through crime, trial, incarceration and public judgment. Jack represents the possibility that identity can change.

The tragedy is that society may not permit those two identities to remain separate.

That tension helps explain why Boy A continues to generate discussion long after its original television broadcast and theatrical release.

The Lasting Legacy of BoyAMovie.com

BoyAMovie.com is best understood today as part of the digital history surrounding an unusually successful British drama.

The website was created to promote a specific film at a specific moment, but the movie it represented developed a much longer life.

Boy A introduced international audiences to Andrew Garfield as a major dramatic talent. It contributed to John Crowley's growing reputation as a filmmaker. It demonstrated the strength of Rob Hardy's cinematography and Mark O'Rowe's adaptation, and it successfully moved from a Channel 4 production to the Toronto International Film Festival and international theatrical distribution.

More importantly, the story remains relevant.

The Internet has made forgetting increasingly difficult. Search engines, social media, online archives and digital news databases can preserve identities and past actions indefinitely. In that environment, the question at the heart of Boy A becomes more complicated rather than less:

What does a second chance actually mean if society never forgets the first life?

That question gives Boy A significance beyond its original 2007 release and gives BoyAMovie.com historical interest beyond its role as a conventional promotional website. The domain is a surviving marker of a film whose themes—identity, punishment, rehabilitation, privacy, media exposure and forgiveness—have arguably become even more relevant in the digital age.