Tollbooth: A Clever Welsh Black Comedy with A Familiar Ring

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

The movie Tollbooth is a deadpan black comedy set in southwest Wales, where according to the graffiti on a road sign, “English people come to die.” This warped Welsh Western, from first-time director Ryan Andrew Hopper, stars poker-faced Michael Smiley (known for Ben Wheatley’s films, Kill List and A Field in England) as a quiet tollbooth operator with a distant mysterious past.

For the past 29 years, he has been spending his days in a small roadside hut with his thermos and novel in an exceedingly quiet post near a small village of Dale, where everyone knows him simply as Toll Booth. It’s the kind of place where nothing ever happens, until one day when everything does.

First, the toll operator gets robbed at gunpoint by balaclava-wearing triplet sisters (all played by Gwyneth Keyworth), who are the local farmer’s daughters bent on social media notoriety. They take the contents of his till (£1.20), his wristwatch, and a ham sandwich. Toll Booth makes a phone call to inform someone of what has happened. “I’ll expect recompense, if not retribution,” he says darkly.

Shortly after, a flashy London gangster (Gary Beadle) comes past the toll booth in a vintage Morris Minor convertible. He immediately recognizes the toll-keeper as an old crony, Brendan, and makes a phone call to his boss. Brendan, it turns out, is wanted by scary people.

Lucky for him, Brendan doesn’t just have a checkered past but an actively shady present, running a criminal network that involves most of the local village. He has a couple of henchmen, Dom (Game of Thrones’ Iwan Rheon) and an ambulance driver (Paul Kaye) to do his dirty work. Not everyone is in on the game: The town also includes a xenophobic English gas station owner (Steve Oram) who came to Wales to get away from the foreigners.

Eager to join Brendan’s crime racket is Dixie (Evelyn Mok) who wants to fund her career as an Elvis impersonator by becoming a criminal enforcer. She has a psycho sidekick (Darren Evans) who says things that only she can understand. Though both keen for violence, they’re not careful at reading inventory sheets. Dixie has a bitter moment when she realizes that a van load of what she thought were black market “iPads” are actually medical eye pads.

Set against this conspiracy of smalltown venality, on the side of goodness, justice and tenderness, there’s Catrin (Annes Elwy), a young policewoman, who has been mourning the hit-and-run death of her father for the past year. When she becomes aware of what’s been going on around her, she notes, “I was turning a blind eye, but I didn’t know I was.”

Running a brisk 83-minutes, with a non-linear script framed around Catrin’s investigation, Tollbooth has plenty of quirky characters, slapstick violence, and some sharp dialogue from screenwriter Matt Redd (“I did something terrible and someone’s going to have to pay for it,” mulls Toll Booth.)

For better or worse, the movie is also brashly unoriginal, riding the line between inspiration and mere imitation. There are nods to the Coen brothers’ Fargo, Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) and, most distinctly, the bloody-minded humour of the Irish brothers, Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, In Bruges) and his brother, John Michael McDonagh (The Guard).

Like a fast-food snack, at least you know exactly what you’re getting.

Tollbooth. Directed by Ryan Andrew Hopper and written by Matt Redd. Starring Michael Smiley, Annes Elwy, Gwyneth Keyworth, Gary Beadle, Evelyn Mok, Iwan Rheon, and Paul Kaye. Available on VOD/Digital platforms from March 18.