Rebecca Sandulak, Bekks Images

I honestly don’t know how this horse fits into the rest of High Life, but it’s certainly intriguing.

High Life

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Globe Cinema

Given how grey and grungy the city looks in director Gary Yates’ snew screen adaptation of Lee MacDougall’s hit play High Life, nursing a narcotic addiction seems like a perfectly sensible way to get through a Winnipeg winter. The early ’80s setting is another reason for the ugliness on display, though thankfully this blackly comic crime story is attractive for other reasons.

The biggest are MacDougall’s punchy dialogue and well-honed characters, virtues that are obviously appreciated by an eager cast led by Timothy Olyphant. The chronically underappreciated star of defunct HBO western Deadwood and last year’s superior cult thriller A Perfect Getaway, Olyphant plays Dick, a morphine addict and hospital orderly who means well but is far too lazy to get his life on the straight and narrow. Instead, he’s drawn into a scheme by his freshly released prison buddy, Bug (Stephen Eric McIntyre), and fellow junkies Donnie (Joe Anderson) and Billy (Rossif Sutherland).

Being the most lucid of these waste-cases by a slim margin, Dick qualifies as the mastermind behind their plan to rip-off a newfangled addition to a downtown bank known as an ATM. What with the unreliable nature and general twitchiness of the personnel involved, the heist is clearly doomed to fail. That it fails so spectacularly — and so violently — makes for surprisingly entertaining viewing.

Adapting his own play — first staged in 1996 and later produced in New York, London and Tokyo — MacDougall keeps the energy high and the mood nervy in this film version. The work’s roots seem largely cinematic anyhow, MacDougall’s characters having an obvious kinship with the ruthless yet loquacious scuzzbags who populated the ’80s and ’90s flicks of John Dahl, the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino. (This crew’s affection for April Wine also makes High Life play like a darker but equally hoser-ific variant of the Trailer Park Boys movies.)

Since the film runs a terse 80 minutes, the material ultimately seems more meagre than it ought to. Nevertheless, the actors and director Gary Yates rarely put a foot wrong as they convey the messy travails of guys who can’t do anything right.