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It’s in fair Glasgow that Mint lays its scene, with a grudge between rival clans and the spilling of civil blood: yes, it’s another modern-day transplant of Romeo and Juliet. As a brew of crime, romance and family saga, it’s a beguiling oddity in the hands of Charlotte Regan, who announces herself here as one of the most distinctive voices in British television.
The star-crossed lovers are Shannon (Emma Laird) and Arran (Benjamin Coyle-Larner, aka rapper Loyle Carner), who lock eyes across a train station. Their world reorganises itself, the frisson undeniable. This is forbidden love, naturally, and not exactly great timing, either: tensions between the families are escalating. Shannon’s father Dylan (a pensive Sam Riley) has caused shockwaves by announcing out of the blue that he’s stepping down as head of the crime syndicate.
While most Romeo and Juliet retellings get so tangled up in the tragedy that they forget to linger on that heady, helpless feeling of being romantically intoxicated, Regan doesn’t. A filmmaker who spent 15 years making music videos before her 2023 debut feature Scrapper won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, she has a uniquely lyrical style. She uses the frame in an almost sculptural way, with elliptical, impressionistic vignettes – grainy Super 8 fragments, dream montages – immersing us in this charged, rain-soaked world of longing and menace. It’s gorgeous to look at.
Forbidden love: Arran and Shannon, played by Benjamin Coyle-Larner and Emma Laird (House/Fearless Minds/BBC)
Reflecting Shannon’s romantic fervour, Regan’s camera floods the screen with fantasy: sparks literally fly between the young lovers – the pair of them soaring off the ground – capturing that sensation of falling for the wrong person, even though it feels so right. Admittedly, the symbolism is laid on thick, the crackle of electricity actually audible, and at times it heaves with portent – none more so than when Moses Sumney’s celestial “Doomed” drifts in over the second episode’s flashbacks. Kudos, though, to Patrick Jonsson for a score that consistently slaps.
The performances are vital to this BBC One eight-parter working. Having appeared in last year’s Oscar winner The Brutalist, Laird is exceptional here, her face a sustained close-up that you feel you’re reading rather than watching. Opposite her, Coyle-Larner – who studied at Drama Centre before becoming a musician – operates mainly in silence, saying almost everything with his eyes. Elsewhere, orbiting a man for whom violence is second nature, Shannon’s mother Cat and grandmother Ollie (played brilliantly by Laura Fraser and Lindsay Duncan respectively) betray fearful chinks in their armour: namely, an inkling that Shannon is about to reiterate their past mistakes.
This won’t be for everyone. Depending on your threshold for surrealism, Mint may occasionally feel like it’s floating pretentiously above its own plot. In a recent interview, Regan said that “growing up, all I saw was films where everyone working class was depressed and I wanted to make something with them happy”. Even in a story that primes us for tragedy, that instinct pulses through every scene. Between the violence and brooding machismo, there is unmitigated joy. Mint is how you make something ancient feel alive.