Skin (2014) watch online HD

I read on a short film blog that the director wanted to tell this story of Martyka 'Skin Dog' Brandt because it is a different side of the story that one normally associates with the more often publicized activities of The Mongrel Mob. Brandt, for all his history and tattoos, raised 10 children – 4 of his own and 6 through fostering; in the film he talks a little bit about his past and why he came to join the Mongrel Mob, leading into the way that being a parent changed him, changed his focus and made him want to be a better person for the sake of the children.

In doing this the film is quite engaging because Brandt is no way looks like the sort of person who you would expect to be talking openly about his feelings, about his love for others and other such matters, so it is interesting to see a side of him that it is unlikely you would ever think to look for. It is perhaps a little cloying in the way it does it and the music it chooses to play underneath, but it is not heavy-handed and for sure could have been a lot more sentimental. I did have a problem with the film though in that, in presenting "the other side" of the story, it does rather assume you already know the side that normally gets publicised and, if you are like me, you didn't. I guess maybe a country-specific gang may be bigger knowledge outside of New Zealand and maybe it is just me being uninformed (I would probably assume everyone knows all the Northern Irish terrorist groups), but I would guess for most it is both sides of the story we need – even if one is much more of a focus.

The film doesn't really do this though and, aside from some very brief clips at the start, I certainly didn't think of the gang in the terms that I did after doing a quick Google and reading about their associations with violent armed robberies, prostitution, drugs and other such crimes. Probably more than this though, what I didn't get was a sense of Brandt's involvement in all this – being in a gang doesn't mean he himself has dealt drugs and acted as a pimp, although if he has then maybe this aspect could at least have been raised, if only to act as a place of comparison to make the "redemption" side of the story work. Without this it does feel like the film is not as impacting as it should have been and it just because a simpler thing of stereotypes as one would naturally assume a man in a biker gang and covered in face tattoos to be a criminal (although in this case we have to make assumptions as we are not really told).

It is a positive film and it does make one think beyond the appearance of the skin, but it is probably more effective as a film if you are aware of who the Mongrel Mob are, and would have worked a bit better had it not focused so much on the "other side" of the story in order to counteract the focus of the media, but rather tried to tell both sides to produce a more balanced and accessible film.