Peter McGinn
Jan 30, 2021
7/10
Hector is a quiet film, cautiously paced, which is to say if you require explosions, sex or violence to keep you alert, have a pillow handy. We follow the homeless Hector, but he isn’t the living in a box under the overpass kind of homeless. He keeps on the move, at least in the time covered by this movie, as he walks and hitchhikes his way from Glasgow, Scotland south to London for a Christmas shelter stay that seems to be a tradition for him.
Perhaps due to a medical condition that arises, he chooses this migration to try to reconnect to his siblings. They don’t appreciate it. His brother is played angrily by Stephen Tompkinson and his sister by the actress you may have seen on recent shows such as Vera, I especially remember her as Irene from The Forsyth Saga. It is a great ensemble cast.
I had a little trouble catching some of the dialogue in places, not so much because of the accents— I am used to that. It was more because he tended to almost mumble at times. But I was listening late at night and had the volume low.
It isn’t a film I would want to watch a second time, but it was well worth the time to see it once.