Charlotte Regan’s Mint is a stylish Scottish crime romance that flashes with working-class authenticity, yet ultimately falls short of the narrative force and emotional depth its dazzling promise suggests.
Going into Mint (world premiere in the Berlinale Special Series category), my expectations were perhaps unfairly high. Charlotte Regan’s debut feature Scrapper (2023) was one of my favourite movies that year: fresh, tender, formally inventive, and unapologetically rooted in working-class Britain. A modern, female Ken Loach, if you like — but with her own playful, music-video-influenced cinematic style.
That she made such a startlingly brilliant film at such a young age made her political and cultural debut one of the most impressive I’ve seen — so the prospect of an eight-part crime-romance set in Scotland, drawing on gangster tropes that she (and I) love, was truly thrilling. Add to that a recent wave of great British crime family dramas — This City Is Ours (2025), Kin (2021) — and the casting of Ben Coyle-Larner (of Loyle Carner fame) in his acting debut, and I was ready to be completely bowled away.
Mint follows a classic Romeo-and-Juliet setup — Shannon (Emma Laird), daughter of a dominant crime family, falls for Arran (Ben Coyle-Larner), a recent arrival in the town who gets involved with a rival gang. Shannon’s budding relationship inversely mirrors the breakdown of her parents’s previously stable marriage, interrogating the audience to ask what true love really means, how to get it, and whether and where you can make it last. As the younger generation of the series grapples with questions around coming of age, the places they come from and the places they want to go to, the older generation struggle with the choices they’ve made, the relationships they’re in, and how to cope with what remains. As in all great family crime dramas, Mint is just as much about gang warfare as it is about falling in love, a sense of belonging, and the weight of familial expectation.
In many ways, Mint delivers a truly unique, fresh take on a classic genre. Regan’s sensibility is unmistakable: always stylish, dry, self-deprecating, and working-class to its core. Her vision of Scotland is often bleak, often grey, filled with damp pavements and smoking factories, then turn a corner and you’re hit with panoramic landscapes that take your breath away – familiar to anyone who’s spent time in rural Scottish towns!
The series comes alive in its impeccable cinematography, montage and soundtrack. Regan’s background in music videos is clear throughout the editing; grainy camcorder footage is spliced with dreamy slow-mo, sparks fly in magical-realist flashes, kids dance while rival gangs collide in choreographed chaos. At its best, the show transcends the crime genre entirely, becoming something closer to visual poetry.
And yet, I still left feeling a little disappointed.
For all its stylistic invention, the script feels thin, and the performances — including Coyle-Larner’s — often fall flat. Whilst there are moments of genuine magic, the more conventional narrative fails to grip the audience. The tension never reaches that of Kin, the operatic weight of The Sopranos, or the sociological depth of The Wire. The stakes are rarely high, and plot points often feel contrived.
The series, unfortunately, doesn’t manage to fully harness its own potential. Whilst Mint remains consistent with Regan’s broader project to centre working-class narratives and her stylish experimentalism promises a show that reinvents the genre, the narrative fails to deliver.
It’s far from a failure, but coming from a filmmaker who announced herself with such astonishing clarity, Mint feels less like a knockout blow and more like an uncertain second album.
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
