Bleak House

Based on the harrowing and ultimately life-affirming memoir by Kevin Lewis, The Kid is a shocking portrait of child abuse and neglect set in 1980s and 1990s south-east London.

Actor turned director Nick Moran continues to flourish behind the camera, pulling few punches with his depiction of the brutality suffered by Kevin in the council estate house that became his prison.

Locked in his room, the battered and bruised youngster sought refuge in his imagination, honing the storytelling skills that would sow the seeds of a best-selling literary career many years later.

Moran’s film opens on a bleak note with the lead character’s attempted suicide – “It was March ’93, a Wednesday I think, when I decided to kill myself” – then rewinds to 1980 to chronicle the catalogue of errors that condemns a helpless boy to the tirades of his parents.

Kevin (William Finn Miller) is a punchbag for his volatile mother Gloria (Natascha McElhone) and father Dennis (Con O’Neill) until social services finally intervene, placing the boy in a home run by Uncle David (Bernard Hill).

No sooner has Kevin settled in and begun to flourish than social services intervenes again, this time to return him to his parents.

The cycle of violence continues and as Kevin enters his difficult teenage years (now played by Augustus Prew), he arouses the interest of concerned teacher Colin Smith (Ioan Gruffudd).

“His dad’s an alcoholic and his mum’s Frankenstein in drag, apparently,” a fellow teacher tells Colin, who inspires Kevin to stand on his own two feet and to seek a new life, enveloped by the love of foster parents Alan (James Fox) and Margaret (Shirley Anne Field).

Once again, fate conspires against Kevin (now played by Rupert Friend) and he plunges into the abyss – the only glimmer of hope, a fledgling romance with a beautiful girl called Jackie (Jodie Whittaker).

The Kid is an accomplished adaptation of Lewis’s autobiographical novel that hammers home Kevin’s suffering at the hands of a monstrous matriarch, who justifies her beatings many years later by claiming: “I stopped you turning into a little poof.”

McElhone is almost unrecognisable behind spectacles, bedraggled hair and a mouth full of filthy, crooked teeth.

Miller and Prew endure most of the beatings while Friend plays Kevin as a cripplingly shy, wounded soul, who doesn’t seem at all surprised when misfortune comes his way.

The tone is grim with occasional flecks of humour, such as when Kevin swabs the floors of a disused warehouse because “some Swedish nutters want to turn this place into a furniture store”. Ho ho.

A coda of footage of the real-life Kevin and his wife leaves a lump in the throat as we contemplate the extraordinary, enduring power of the human spirit.