Lolita meets The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in Andrea Arnold’s second feature film, a work if anything more accomplished than her internationally-praised debut Red Road (2006). Initially, as fifteen-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) gets into scraps on her estate and secretly practices her hip hop dancing, we expect a standard working class fable of achievement: art provides redemption for put-upon prole. But appearances are deceptive in Arnold’s work, and the addition of a dynamic new figure in Mia’s life soon leads Fish Tank as far from the customary coming of age tale as Red Road was from a straightforward revenge narrative. Mia’s young, volatile mother (played with copious trashy sexiness by Kierston Wareing, who comes off like some kitchen sink analogue for Pamela Anderson) brings home a new boyfriend – which is not a rare occurrence in itself, one senses. But this time the man in question (Michael Fassbender) is a figure of some fascination. Fassbender elegantly pulls off the challenge of playing a man with whom most of the other characters and at least half of the audience must fall in love: his Connor is kind, intelligent, beautiful, conspicuously concerned for the welfare of Mia and her little sister, and frequently shirtless to boot. What isn’t clear is where his presence within the family is taking them. Time and again Arnold brings us to the brink of a pat resolution – Won’t this golden stranger bring hope and redemption? Surely true love will transform bad mothering into good? And won’t the girl no-one rates finally be celebrated for her talent? – only to double back and show us something a little more awkward, a little more shabby, a little more like life. When Connor takes the family into the countryside and teaches Mia how to catch a fish with her bare hands, it’s the sort of positive, meaningful moment that would stand, in another film, for everything being all right: the ignorant and poorly-nourished citydwellers have been introduced to raw nature and wild produce by a man whose closeness to nature (and wholesome Irish accent!) is certain proof of his virtue. But the fish is never eaten; it’s left to go bad in the kitchen when Connor makes one of his regular exits back to his mysterious other life. It’s this absence of sentimental predictability, supported by performances that are exquisitely judged across the board, that makes Fish Tank a film experience of such sophistication and emotional insight.