In Andrea Arnold's washed-out Scottish melodrama Red Road, Kate Dickie plays a watcher for Glasgow's "City Eye," a camera-connected security station that monitors criminal activity around the towering Red Road apartment buildings. Because Dickie is supposed to call the police whenever she sees anything suspicious, she half-imagines herself as the arbiter of the lives she follows on her hundreds of tiny screens. If she spots a couple having sex in an alley, she lets it go, because she's partial to quickies herself. But when she notices that the male half of the couple looks a lot like a convicted criminal who had a direct hand in destroying her marriage years earlier, Dickie can't just ignore it. She follows him with her remote-control cameras, and when their range proves too limited, Dickie clocks out and hits the streets to practice some private surveillance.
