Skeet

Written and directed by Nik Sexton | Playing until May 28th in St. John’s & at the Nickel Film Fest

Reviewed by Amanda Marie Hull

If you haven’t seen Nik Sexton’s Skeet – but you think you know what it’s about – trust me, you don’t. If this film is one thing, it’s wonderfully unpredictable. At first glance, the award-winning drama appears to be a classic redemption tale: a man is released from prison; hoping to escape his violent past, he struggles to find his footing in a changed world. But Sexton sidesteps both sentimentality and trope. What emerges is something more honest and enduring, an unexpectedly powerful film that offers a new perspective on second chances, unlikely friendships, and the layered social dynamics of a contemporary inner-city neighbourhood shaped by displacement, poverty, and migration.

Set in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Skeet follows the lives of two men: Billy Skinner (Sean Dalton), a newly freed ex-con and former enforcer for a local drug gang – a lifestyle inherited from a childhood underscored by abuse and loss – and Mohamed (Jay Abdo), a Syrian refugee trying to build a new life for his family in Billy’s place of origin. Billy returns home with every intention of staying clean, reconnecting with his estranged son, and becoming a better person. But as Skeet makes abundantly clear, good intentions rarely stand alone.

The title is more than Newfoundland slang – it’s stigma, a classist slur meant to demean, to mark someone as ‘less-than,’ undeserving of respect. But Sexton complicates this label by refusing to flatten his characters into stereotypes – junkie, refugee, lowlife, skeet – despite the obvious trappings. Instead, we see fathers, mothers, children, dreamers, survivors. A poet with the heart of a killer, a doctor who saves and needs saving, a victim turned avenger.          

Dalton’s performance as Billy is raw and magnetic. He carries his role like a man bracing against the wind: always tense, alert, perpetually on the verge of breaking. His eyes flicker with the residue of violence, but there’s something fiercely vulnerable beneath the surface, a palpable longing to be seen as something other than what everyone remembers.                 

Abdo is his perfect counterbalance. His Mohamed is neither a saint nor a narrative device. He’s fully realized: patient, principled, aware of how others see him, unwilling to surrender to bitterness. One of Skeet’s most affecting choices is to let Mohamed remain unbroken. In offering Billy unconditional grace, he becomes the film’s moral compass – not to redeem Billy, but to remind us of what it means to hold dignity in a world that too often seeks to erase it.

The friendship that grows between the two men is authentic and deeply mutual, a bond forged not in spite of difference, but because of shared estrangement. They must each navigate the margins of society to build a home and rebuild an identity in a place that is reluctant to embrace them. What materializes is a new kind of family, stitched together across fault lines of culture, exile, reintegration, and a need to belong.                   

Shot entirely in black and white, the film refuses to romanticize. It strips away the postcard-pretty image of Newfoundland, replacing it with the harsh edges of survival, the weight of memory, the ache of transformation. The choice to desaturate the image isn’t just aesthetic; it’s philosophical. Blood doesn’t splash red. Violence doesn’t become spectacle. Instead, it lingers like smoke: omnipresent, corrosive, mundane. It’s not about the violence but the aftermath. It’s also about contrast, about visualizing Billy’s inner conflict: a man trying to live in the light but bound to shadow. The gravitational pull of his past is immense; his resistance to it becomes the film’s central tension.           

Skeet doesn’t flinch from the hard stuff – addiction, racism, inhumanity, indifference, intergenerational pain – but it doesn’t wallow either. Interspersed with brutality and struggle are remarkable scenes of warmth, compassion, and intimacy; surprising moments of laughter and love; organic scenes of celebration, of becoming and overcoming. The film moves fast but with quiet confidence, trusting the intelligence of its audience, the integrity of its characters, the veracity of its plot.          

In the end, Skeet is about the courage it takes to show up – for yourself, for someone else, for a community that might not be ready to welcome you. It’s about how people can be changed – by trauma, by friendship, by grace, by failure. And above all, by choice. The film never promises redemption, only the possibility of it, halting and imperfect, and that’s part of what makes it so compelling. With this must-see feature, Sexton proves that stories from the margins aren’t just worth telling, they’re the ones that most need to be told.