TLDR: Rapper Loyle Carner makes his acting debut in BBC drama Mint, bringing visual flair but limited emotional depth to the crime series.
When Charlotte Regan’s debut feature film, Scrapper, won the grand jury prize at the prestigious Sundance film festival in 2023, it announced a filmmaker of rare instinctive warmth.
Scrapper showed Regan to be capable of rendering working-class life with tenderness, wit and a magical lightness that felt entirely her own. With her new eight-part BBC series Mint, the filmmaker turns her hand to crime drama, bringing that same sensibility to television.
Mint sits squarely within what film scholar David Forrest, in his 2020 book New Realism: Contemporary British Cinema, identified as a poetic turn in British screen culture. Where the social realist tradition (think the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh) favours direct, politically explicit storytelling, this newer mode prefers something more impressionistic and ambiguous. Forrest traces this tendency through filmmakers such as Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard and Shane Meadows. Regan is its natural inheritor.
That she should apply this sensibility to a BBC crime drama was, at first, enough to raise an eyebrow. The genre’s conventions (cold proceduralism, gritty realism, familiar signifiers of deprivation) seem antithetical to everything that made Scrapper so alive – a film in which a 12-year-old girl squatting alone in a council house is the unlikely centre of a story that is both sweet and charming.