The star-crossed lovers are Shannon (Emma Laird) and Arran (Benjamin Coyle-Larner, aka rapper Loyle Carner<\/a>), 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\u2019s father Dylan (a pensive Sam Riley<\/a>) has caused shockwaves by announcing out of the blue that he\u2019s stepping down as head of the crime syndicate.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t. 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 \u2013 grainy Super 8 fragments, dream montages \u2013 immersing us in this charged, rain-soaked world of longing and menace. It\u2019s gorgeous to look at.<\/p>\n Reflecting Shannon\u2019s romantic fervour, Regan\u2019s camera floods the screen with fantasy: sparks literally fly between the young lovers \u2013 the pair of them soaring off the ground \u2013 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 \u2013 none more so than when Moses Sumney\u2019s celestial \u201cDoomed\u201d drifts in over the second episode\u2019s flashbacks. Kudos, though, to Patrick Jonsson for a score that consistently slaps.<\/p>\n The performances are vital to this BBC One eight-parter working. Having appeared in last year\u2019s Oscar winner The Brutalist<\/a>, Laird is exceptional here, her face a sustained close-up that you feel you\u2019re reading rather than watching. Opposite her, Coyle-Larner \u2013 who studied at Drama Centre before becoming a musician \u2013 operates mainly in silence, saying almost everything with his eyes. Elsewhere, orbiting a man for whom violence is second nature, Shannon\u2019s mother Cat and grandmother Ollie (played brilliantly by Laura Fraser and Lindsay Duncan<\/a> respectively) betray fearful chinks in their armour: namely, an inkling that Shannon is about to reiterate their past mistakes.<\/p>\n This won\u2019t be for everyone. Depending on your threshold for surrealism, Mint may occasionally feel like it\u2019s floating pretentiously above its own plot. In a recent interview, Regan said that \u201cgrowing up, all I saw was films where everyone working class was depressed and I wanted to make something with them happy\u201d. 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":541419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-541418","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Forbidden](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/562024.jpeg\")
Forbidden love: Arran and Shannon, played by Benjamin Coyle-Larner and Emma Laird (House\/Fearless Minds\/BBC)<\/p>\n