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# FILM REVIEW: ‘In From The Side’ – a rollercoaster ride from Matt Carter
- URL: https://www.scenemag.co.uk/film-review-in-from-the-side-a-rollercoaster-ride-from-matt-carter/
- Published: 2023-04-13T13:00:15.000Z
- Updated: 2023-04-13T12:14:23.000Z
- Description: Emmerdale star Alexander Lincoln plays the moody young hunk Mark, who’s trapped in an unhappy relationship with a detached, well-off businessman who is seldom at home.
- Author: Brian Butler
- Tags: Netflix

The **South London Stags** is a cash-strapped gay rugby club struggling to keep its newly-formed B team afloat.

But when secret love hits the locker room, there’s a roller coaster ride for the whole team in **Matt Carter**’s engaging film. *Emmerdale* star **Alexander Lincoln** plays the moody young hunk Mark, who’s trapped in an unhappy relationship with a detached, well-off businessman who is seldom at home.

What Carter, who co-writes with **Adam Silver**, is setting up is a situation where Mark is looking for another kind of love. And so too is Warren (a film debut for **Alexander King**) – star of the A team, even hunkier than Mark, and as it turns out, even more mixed up.

A chance physically intimate encounter in, where else but a toilet, leads to an instant and pretty frenetic night in bed, with all the usual regrets and embarrassment the morning after.

But we’re left in no doubt in this slow-moving romance that this secret liaison will continue, with ups and downs until a dramatic climax is reached that rivals the climaxes in the bedroom.

King is terrific as the unpredictable, slightly dangerous and arrogant guy who hides his weaknesses below a brash facade. Lincoln is more studied, more thoughtful and does the anguish thing really well – we really feel for him in a way we don’t for Warren.

When the two manage to manoeuvre a Christmas together with Mark’s parents in Switzerland, it seems that romance will blossom and grow. But of course that would be dramatically boring, and there has to be a great reveal and confrontation to make the tension work.

Though the rugby games and the club’s survival are a secondary issue, Carter directs the rugby practices and raw physicality of their matches with a choreographed, balletic beauty that seems contradictory, but works superbly.

And do Mark and Warren live happily ever after ? Well you’ll have to catch the film to find out, but as Mark’s mother tells him: “a relationship born from deception only continues to create more”.

***In From The Side* is available on Netflix.**