Before we begin I feel it is my obligation to note that the director of the film has a distant personal connection to me, which may influence my perception and analysis of the movie. So I would encourage you to watch this film to draw your own conclusions too.
If you require a summary as to what this film is about, the plot centers around a young troublemaker called Lee (Mitchell Fisher) striking it lucky and winning the Lottery for a glorious couple of hours until he is assaulted and has his ticket stolen from him. There is a love triangle at its core with him, a girl called Ruby he met at the local off licence (played by Niamh Branigan) and Lee's assaulter Will (Neizan Fernandez).
In terms of my experience, I found this to be a particularly impressive film especially considering the budget involved. What makes it work is that the film largely let's it's pretty unique premise and it's ability to give space for the actors to perform. Clearly Ryan had a lot of justifiable faith in the cast to deliver as you can see in the way that there are a number of single take shots. It's also clear that there has been a lot of time dedicated to the script to try and strengthen the characters and therefore the actors' performances as much as possible too. Often when watching lower budget films it's easy for a writer to fall into a trap of having every character reflect their voice, but in this case each character is pretty unique in the way they speak and they have a lot of complexity to them.
I think the direction is impressive. As mentioned there some solid cinematography that allows the actors to perform, but there is a lot of visual elements that enable the story telling. There's a certain claustrophobia to a lot of the film. At the start there's a lot of close up shots to reflect that Lee feels trapped or interrogated. I think the low budget has helped in this regard as you don't have the premium of paying for a studio and are limited to locations which obviously have their own geographical restrictions. There's some interesting lighting choices too, particularly during a sequence where Ruby and Lee are in bed and her face is lit up by just the phone. It helps create the impression that she is innocent.
Of course that's not to say that Lottery doesn't have its limitations of course. Being a very low budget film, there are the occasional technical issues. For instance, while the sound was largely clear and I didn't have issues understanding the dialogue, there is the occasional distraction due to hearing a bit of natural reverb and the occasional bit where the audio sounds bit muffled. Sound is incredibly difficult to capture of course, especially when filming in small locations and Lottery doesn't have the money thrown at it like Tenet did (which really had no excuse for its unintelligible sound), but I'd be lying if I didn't notice it from time to time.
I did have the occasional nitpick when watching too. I found myself questioning character interactions occasionally. For instance it struck me as odd that Lee was so trusting of Ruby early on and I was confused as to the interaction between Ruby and Lee when she asks him 'what ticket?'. It's a relatively minor one in the grand scheme of things.
Ultimately I would advise anyone reading this review to give this film a go. It's never unengaging and is a enjoyable journey with different twists and turns throughout. Plus it's just good to support cinema filmed in Lancashire.
