Protein review

By Terry Sherwood

Tony Burke’s Protein is a crime film steeped in noir aesthetics, unfolding with quiet menace and a brooding sense of moral ambiguity. At its core is Sion (Craig Russell), a withdrawn drifter who takes a job cleaning at a local gym, where his presence begins to unsettle the routines of single mother Katrina Jones (Kezia Burrows). What initially appears to be a grounded, character-driven thriller    streaming TV series, it gradually veers into more unsettling territory—prompting debate about the film’s genre identity. Like Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs, Protein flirts with horror’s visceral edge, challenging the boundaries of crime storytelling with its slow, methodical descent into darkness

Co-written with Mike Oughton and expanding on Burke’s 2014 short of the same name, Protein starts off with Sion, a former soldier recently returned to an unnamed Welsh town from a failed stint in London, barely speaks. He jogs. He lifts weights with maniacal purpose. He lives in a squat near a derelict shop with a working freezer. His life appears monkish even—until we learn that he’s begun methodically dismembering and preserving the remains of those who cross moral lines he cannot abide.

The first to go is Dwayne Roberts (Kai Owen), a thug with a local reputation and a handsy approach to women—including Katrina. Sion exacts bloody vengeance, but his clean-up job leaves behind a signature that attracts the attention of Met detective Patch (Andrea Hall), who has been hunting a serial killer with the same precise, cannibalistic modus operandi. As she follows the trail west, Sion inadvertently ignites a turf war between rival gang factions, each more brutish and oblivious than the last.

What makes Protein so compelling is not the carnage alone, but how deftly Burke and Oughton embed that violence within a rich noir framework. Sion’s moral ambiguity, the shadowy cinematography, and the encroaching sense of entrapment in a community rotting from within recall the grit of British crime classics. There’s a spiritual kinship with Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes—both films center on veterans transformed into avenging spectres, bringing justice to places that the law fails to reach. Yet Protein distinguishes itself with an odd tenderness at its core.

Despite his monstrous actions, Sion is not presented as a mere killer. He’s a broken man, trying—however grotesquely—to put things right. The title Protein becomes a metaphor not just for bodybuilding, but for consumption, transformation, and control. Sion consumes the flesh of others not out of sadism, but in a strange, perhaps delusional effort at self-repair. It’s noir not just in aesthetic but in theme: the world is corrupt, people are compromised, and redemption is always paid for in blood.

The supporting cast deepens the film’s emotional stakes. Katrina, played with warmth and quiet desperation by Kezia Burrows, sees the gentleness beneath Sion’s hard surface. She’s not naïve—just starved for real decency in a town where men like Dwayne are common currency. Even the detectives bring texture beyond standard procedural types: Patch and her local partner Stanton (Charles Dale) are both recovering alcoholics, weathered and weary but still clinging to a sense of order. Their scenes together are understated but intimate—two people trying to make sense of an increasingly irrational chain of events.

Perhaps the most surprising element in Protein is its vein of dark comedy. Burke mines the stupidity of low-level criminals for all it’s worth. Whether it’s bumbling gang enforcers Nik (Ross O’Hennessy) and Big Tim (Richard Elis), whose romance adds surprising tenderness, or the deadpan dialogue of characters caught between bravado and panic, the film avoids bleakness by showing just how absurd—and human—these figures are. The idiocy of Sion’s opponents often contrasts starkly with his calculated actions, creating a strange, even poetic tension.

Ultimately, Protein is a lean, feral noir. In Sion, we see not a superhero or a slasher, but a ghost of a man who once fought for ideals, now left scavenging for scraps of meaning in a town overrun by petty violence and broken dreams. He is executioner, avenger, and lost soul—more myth than man by the end, yet hauntingly real in every sinew and silence.