What do you do if your short film hits a nerve and takes off? Well, go turn it into a full feature film , best with as many of the lead actors as you can. That, in a way, is the DNA of Eaten by Lions. Has director Jason Wingard, who also co-wrote the script, bitten off a bit more than he can chew in taking this leap? That would be too facile a verdict to cast, and only possible if you approached his creation with any other than a taste for daringly independent film making.
But it's worth sticking with this film and its cast, a good few of them growing into it from the short. Technical set pieces, paying homage to static frames and canvasses. A selection of pastiches riffing on second and third generation British Indian culture and its in-jokes and contradictions. Half-brotherly love, shaped by a dynamic also rooted in an implicit reflection on and of disability. Racism, cutting both ways, playfully mocked throughout.
But ultimately, a coming of age story where opposites meet, then mesh, difference is overcome, prejudice cast away, culminating in a wild house party and its sober aftermath, none of which intended at all to resemble an even marginally plausible unfolding of events.
Eaten by Lions ultimately therefore turns into an homage to transgression, muted to remain within the bounds of tolerance of the common viewer's taste buds.
