This film is an unflinching masterpiece that ventures into the shadows of Britain's Brexit-era society, exposing the inhumane underbelly of the modern meat industry and its treatment of immigrant workers. At the film's emotional core is Beatriz Batarda's mesmerizing performance as Tânia, a woman navigating a murky existence between victimhood and complicity. Batarda commands the screen with a raw intensity, bringing complexity and humanity to a character torn between her dreams of escape and the dark realities she perpetuates. Her portrayal of Tânia is deeply layered, capturing vulnerability, resilience, and the moral ambiguities of survival with grace and ferocity.
The film's setting (a cold, industrial Great Yarmouth) mirrors the brutality of the turkey processing factories that employ waves of immigrant workers. Martins does not shy away from depicting the grotesque physicality of the work, juxtaposed with the workers' dehumanization. This exploitation, eerily echoing the systemic abuses of the transatlantic slave trade, strips laborers of dignity, reducing them to economic units in a relentless cycle of profit. In Tânia's predicament (married to an Englishman and running a labor hiring network) we see the echoes of history: how individuals can become both pawns and enablers in systems of oppression.
Martins' direction combines stark realism with nightmarish overtones, delivering a chilling exploration of modern servitude. The meat industry, as portrayed in this film, becomes a harrowing metaphor for unchecked greed, where lives are ground down as readily as the flesh being processed. Like slavery, this system thrives on the exploitation of society's most vulnerable, highlighting the moral decay that comes when human lives are commodified.
Great Yarmouth is not an easy watch, but it is an essential one. It confronts its audience with uncomfortable truths about the intersection of labor, migration, and humanity's capacity for cruelty. Anchored by Batarda's tour de force, the film stands as a stark reminder of the cost of ignoring the invisible workers who sustain industries far removed from public scrutiny. It forces us to ask: how much has truly changed since the darkest chapters of human history?
