Brutal, clever prison drama mixes complexity and grace

David Jonsson mesmerises in the violent 'Wasteman', writes Clarisse Loughrey, while Mary Bronstein's 'If I Had Legs I'd Kick You' is tender but visceral, and 'The Secret Agent' is a bold, visually ravishing excavation of dictatorship-era Brazil

- 

Keep your eye on David Jonsson. The 32-year-old actor has built up a steady momentum, transmuting his brief stint on HBO's finance drama Industry, one of the UK's most productive talent factories, into a wide array of big-screen roles: a winsome romcom lead in Rye Lane (2023), a stammering synthetic in Alien: Romulus (2024), and a tortured idealist in the Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk (2025).

It's already an impressive CV, yet it feels like Jonsson is on the precipice of something major. If you see him in Wasteman, you'll understand why.

Cal McMau's debut takes the well-worn path of prison dramas, focusing on a violent feud waged between cell block bunkbeds. But there's enough of a noxious stink in the air - the sense that all the system does is create a microcosm of the state, with even less power to scrap over - that Jonsson has the material he needs to fully mesmerise. He finds poetry within the brutality, his eyebrows turned upward like hands in prayer, his sentences all half-swallowed by his own tongue. He can act as nervous as a mouse, but the resilience is always there; the survivor's drive.

Here he plays Taylor, the kind of guy who is easily chewed up by the prison system, a recovering Subutex addict sentenced to 13 years for one horrible mistake. He's told, all of a sudden, that he's eligible for parole. It's not for anything he's achieved; they're just trying to free up the place a little. But it does mean he might finally see his son, a 14-year-old who doesn't even remember his face. All he has to do is stay on his best behaviour. Enter Dee (Tom Blyth). Taylor’s new cellmate turns up bellowing Tony Bennett’s “The Good Life”, with blood on his sweatshirt collar and a crazed look in his eye. He’s a swaggering archetype saved by the small touches of grace in Blyth’s performance. It makes him a far more interesting sparring partner for Jonsson’s character.