Wasteman

Cal McMau's Wasteman premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 (Centrepiece programme) and won McMau the Douglas Hickox Award for Best Debut Director at the British Independent Film Awards in November of that year, with further BIFA nominations for the lead performances and the film as a whole. Lionsgate UK released it theatrically in February 2026. McMau's previous work was in short film and music videos; this is his first feature.

The film is built around David Jonsson — recently emerged from Industry and Alien: Romulus — as Taylor, a quiet prison cook two years from parole, and Tom Blyth as Dee, the newer arrival whose decisions begin to compromise everything Taylor has spent a decade building. Alex Hassell plays Paul, the wing's senior figure, and Paul Hilton, Corin Silva and Neil Linpow round out the ensemble of inmates and officers. McMau shoots almost the entire film inside a single decommissioned prison building, and the camera spends most of its time at body-length distance, in handheld register, with very little non-diegetic score.

Critical reception was extremely strong. The film carries a 100% Tomatometer score across early reviews and reached a 7.7 IMDb user rating during its release window. UK reviewers placed it alongside Steve McQueen's Hunger and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet as a serious carceral drama rather than a genre prison film — though McMau's interest is closer to procedural daily life, and his use of Jonsson's stillness, than to either reference. As a first feature it is unusually controlled, and Jonsson's performance was widely treated as the year's strongest British leading-man turn.