Daunted by yet another opening night soiree, the pattern has become all too familiar of late: alcohol in several varieties, finger food that’s always just out of reach, claustrophobic mingling, exceedingly loud music. But never mind the fact that I couldn’t hear my own voice; this was heady, rambunctious stuff, a real mood setter for the main attraction. So already bludgeoned by the rhythm of live African drum beats, Tsotsi’s thumping title sequence came as no surprise – a swagger through the mean streets of shantytown South Africa that gathers immediate emotional force when a volatile Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae) accosts an elderly man on a train, taking his money before stabbing him in the presence of a cab-full of commuters. This is one angry kid: beating his friend to a pulp; frightening the living shit out of the disabled; and the kicker, jacking a Beamer and leaving its owner for dead.

The problem is that there’s a baby in the backseat: now saddled with a kid, Tsotsi’s history of violence comes under closer scrutiny, revealing a tortured childhood in the absence of a maternal guidepost. Further jolted from his brutal past by Miriam (a mother of one he holds at gunpoint for babysitting tips), Tsotsi’s epiphany is measured, but no less obvious, culminating in a fitting finale that’s preceded by some fairly stock melodrama: the vanilla flavour so often lapped up by Academy voters. Intriguing, if not slightly ironic, is that Tsotsi is simply more compelling when he’s enraged – spit on a brother’s Chuck’s, and there’s hell to pay (along with some of the film’s best moments). Curb his inner-gangster, and you have the inklings of humanism – something you’ll find in far broader strokes in the Showcase’s other missing enfant drama, The Child.—Tim Wong