Jackie (Kate Dickie) works as a uniformed closed-circuit TV (CCTV) security guard in a rough area of Glasgow. She watches a bank of television screens focused the poor neighborhood where graffiti covers building walls and garbage is piled in the streets. It's not a pretty picture but she is very serious about her job. Jackie wears a wedding ring but lives alone. Her lover treats her badly in perfunctory sexual encounters. Sometimes Jackie derives pleasure from the surveillance, such as when she sees the companionship between a man and his sick dog.

One day, she spots a man she recognizes from her past — Clyde (Tony Curran), who has just been released from prison. Jackie becomes obsessed with watching him. He works for a locksmith and lives in a large high-rise building called Red Road. Part of the time, Clyde hangs out with Stevie (Martin Compston), a younger man, and his girlfriend April (Natalie Press).

Writer and director Andrea Arnold has fashioned a thoroughly engrossing thriller done in cooperation with Denmark's Zentropa Studios, home of Lars von Trier. The film has won awards including the Prix du Jury at Cannes and Best Actress and Best Actor at the British Independent Film Awards. It covers a wide variety of interesting themes, including the lack of privacy in a society that tolerates CCTV. It is startling to see how a person's everyday movements can be tracked by law enforcement agencies. Jackie can observe almost everything that happens in a small area of Glasgow.

Arnold does not reveal the connection between Jackie and Clyde, but it compels this middle-age woman to leave the isolation tower of her job and stalk him on the mean streets of the city. One time her eyes are so trained on Clyde that she misses the stabbing of a teenage girl in her area of the city. The tension heightens when Jackie sees Clyde approach a young girl at school. In a bold move, she makes contact with Clyde at a party in his apartment and even dances with him. Is this ex-con just a diligent fellow trying to get back into society without screwing up or is he a dangerous and amoral criminal?

Jackie knows the answer to that question, and she is on a quest that forces her to do some dangerous things and to uncover a soft spot in her heart that has been hardened for many years. Kate Dickie puts in a stellar performance as this obsessed woman, and Tony Curran is appropriately menacing and mysterious as the object of her attention. Red Road also works as a gripping portrait of the loneliness of many urban dwellers.