This shocking and powerful chronicle of ruined lives raises many questions – all of them pertinent, none of them easy to address. Is there hope for those ravaged by the most extreme forms of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, when the damage runs so deep? How can the most victimised find an effective social voice, when figures of authority inspire nothing but fear and contempt in them? And while the chattering classes debate philosophical attitudes to prostitution and pornography, who attends to the needs of those who give their bodies up to it, or monitors its effect upon their minds? Then there's the question of representation. Films like Wasted force the audience to confront a side of life they'd likely cross the street to avoid – an awkward undertaking for what is by convention an entertainment medium. How, then, are viewers to respond? What are the appropriate channels of social action, should they feel driven to take it? Wasted leaves the same raw shock in its wake as Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-ever (2003) or Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream (2000), but its action plays out a good deal closer to home. Based upon a long-running stage project by the Raindog Theatre company, and directed by company co-founders Caroline Paterson and Stuart Davids, Wasted certainly spares us little in its depiction of hurt lives, centrally those of Connor (Neil Leiper) and Suzanne (Emma Hartley Miller). Yet the film also has its uplifting side: amid the squalor there's a true and positive emotional connection between the two young leads, a determination to help one another through and a conviction that one day – surely – things will improve. Even as it screams for acknowledgment of the suffering that's played out daily under our very noses, Wasted allows space for humanity and humour; its characters are people, not statistics, and that's what gives the film such ravaging emotional power. It's also dignified by excellent performances from some of Scotland's finest and best-known actors, among them Kate Dickie, Gary Lewis and David Hayman. A determined and truly accomplished effort to find the human stories behind derogatory jokes about Scotland's 'neds', Wasted turns our heads to what we don't want to see, and forces us to make a connection with feeling human beings who are rarely treated as such.