Following their collaboration on the short films Gandhi at the Bat and Scene, Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm premiered the UK release of their feature length debut, The Red Machine, at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

Despite its low budget the film has so far managed to gain some awards and it is easy to see the great potential within.

Taking place in 1935 Washington, DC at the peak of the Great Depression, cocky safecracker Eddie Doyle’s (Donal Thoms-Cappello) luck runs out and he is captured by the police and  offered an opportunity to get his criminal record erased. The catch? He has to team up with the mysterious Navy spy F. Ellis Coburn (Lee Perkins) and steal a device that the Japanese military are using to encode their top-secret messages.

The two men must try and find a way to get through the Japanese Embassy set in Washington, DC and attempt to successfully get the mysterious device. However, they both soon find out that they are part of a larger plot and with Coburn’s secret in Japan slowly being revealed, their team effort will be tested in greater circumstances than they both originally expected.

The performances from both Donal Thoms-Cappello and Lee Perkins are outstanding and they are supported by a capable cast. Cappello’s acting in the film was really enjoyable to watch and I loved the way that he played the comic character,without ruining the dramatic tone of the film that the directors were obviously aiming for.

Perkins on the other hand does a good job at playing a very serious, cold character and while I enjoyed watching his performance, I wanted to see him do more as he was very serious during most of the film.

As I mentioned previously in this review, this was a very low budget film and the two film directors managed to pull off a very good looking period film. The camera they used did not have the type of quality that I would have liked to see for the period setting, but it did not ruin my experience of the story and the characters.

Overall, this is a film with a very interesting premise and some great acting, but some of the choices of making the film did detract from the impact, particularly in the look of the film, however the story and its characters shone through and it will be great to see what the cast and crew can manage with a bigger budget.

Here’s the trailer.