‘Wasteman’ is an exceptionally gripping British prison drama that draws its power from a single, unbearable moral bind. Set almost entirely behind bars, it follows Taylor, played with bruised vulnerability by David Jonsson, who is nearing parole after thirteen years inside. His crime – s upplying a pill at a rave that inadvertently led to the deaths of two young men – hangs over the film like a permanent moral weight. Taylor is not portrayed as innocent, but neither is he reduced to a monster. What gives him hope, and what raises the stakes unbearably high, is his rediscovered connection with his fourteen-year-old son, a relationship that represents the possibility of redemption, responsibility, and a life beyond incarceration.

Just weeks before his release, Taylor is assigned a new cellmate: Dee (Tom Blyth), in what is one of the most unsettling portrayals of a prison sociopath in recent British cinema. Dee is charming, volatile, and ruthlessly intelligent – a man who runs an empire from inside his cell. He has contraband chocolates, drugs delivered by drone through the window, and even a smartphone, which becomes a crucial narrative device. Dee exerts total psychological dominance over the wing, and it doesn’t take long before he sets his sights on Taylor.

The demand Dee makes is chillingly simple: Taylor must murder two inmates in another part of the prison. If he complies, parole is over and he likely never leaves prison alive. If he refuses, Dee reveals that he knows exactly where Taylor’s son lives – proof arriving in the form of a ‘gift’ sent to the boy’s address. The threat is not abstract; it’s immediate, intimate, and devastating. Taylor is forced into a position where every option guarantees destruction, and the film’s tension comes not from wondering if something terrible will happen, but how it will.

What makes ‘Wasteman’ so effective is its portrait of prison as a closed ecosystem where power does not belong to the guards or the system, but to those willing to weaponize fear. Dee is an extrovert sociopath, a self-declared king of the jungle, while Taylor is inward, depleted, and visibly worn down by years of boredom, guilt, and chemical numbness. Their pairing feels fatally imbalanced from the start, and the film never allows us the comfort of imagining an easy escape.

The film is tightly paced, claustrophobic, and unrelenting, with a constant sense that violence could erupt at any second. It taps into the universal nightmare of the ‘roommate from hell’, but magnifies it through the institutional brutality of prison life, where there is nowhere to hide and no authority that can be trusted. Every interaction feels transactional, every silence loaded.

Rated 18 for good reason, ‘Wasteman’ is not interested in glamour or redemption arcs that come easily. Instead, it asks what survival really costs, and whether the hope of being a father – of being better – can withstand absolute coercion. It’s a ferocious, unsettling film that keeps you guessing until the end, and one that lingers long after the credits roll, precisely because it never offers moral comfort or easy release.