Stone Cold (2016)

Stone Cold is a 2016 movie adaption of the British novel of the same name. Set on the streets in London, the movie switches between Link, a newly homeless seventeen year old adjusting in the situation, and Shelter, an ex-army officer scorned after being dismissed from his job.

Plot
The 17-year old Link, born March 20 1977 in Bradford, Yorkshire, is saddened in 1991 when fourteen when his father abandoned his family for a receptionist. Two years later his mother, who was always a housewife, got a new partner, Vince. Vince is in his 50's and is in the midst of a mid-life crisis, and was incredibly harsh. Link and his sister, Carole, did not get along with him, and his mother was too shy to pacify the situation. Carole moved out after a fight with Vince and started living with her boyfriend, Chris. Link, after getting five GCSE's, dropped out of school, left home due to Vince, and ended up with no place of refuge.

He lingered for some time on the streets of Bradford, occasionally sleeping on his sister's couch, to the irritation of her boyfriend. But, due to the close-knit nature of his community in Bradford, Link found that being in a relationship with his sister there was humiliating, and after an argument with Vince at Christmas, he decided to sneak off to London to start a new life. His sister, Carole, was the only person who knew about this, and so gave him money and saw Link off at the station. In London, he is in the London Borough of Camden, when he sees an advertisement for a small bedsit, and think he's in luck. But he soon finds that the landlord, known as Rat Face, is an unpleasent man, who forces him to pay an extortionate deposit that blows almost all of the money he had left, musing in hindsight that he would have been better off with the YMCA. Despite his best efforts, he is unable to find a job in London, mostly because of his lack of qualifications and his scruffy, un-ironed clothes and tramp-like appearance do him no favors in job interviews. Unable to pay his rent for a second week, Link is evicted and once again rendered homeless. On his first night, Link is forced from a comfortable doorway and his watch was stolen by another homeless man known as the Scouser.

While scouting a new place to sleep, Link meets Ginger, whom he becomes friends with. The two of them decide to pull together, and Ginger shows Link how to survive on the streets. They go out every day and beg, and spend their nights in doorways. When they save up enough money, they are able to spend a night at Captain Hook's, who provides some old, stripped out canal boats for homeless people to sleep. However, one day, Ginger leaves Link for a while because he wants to meet his friends, but does not return. Link is crushed and while having coffee at a kebab shop near where Ginger left him, he meets Gail, a Scottish girl of a similar age to him who has apparently ran away from home, like him. Though Link fancies her, he has suffered too many disappointments in his life to try anything with her and went up to leave. To his surprise, Gail gets agitated and begs him not to leave. Reasoning that she is, like him, frightened of being homeless and in need of help that Ginger gave him, Link takes her under his wing, although it is clear he is in love with her. They spend time together.

Meanwhile, former British Army veteran Shelter, who is 47 years old plans to clean up the streets of London by removing the homeless. Shelter had spent many years working in the Army, and trained young recruits into soldiers. However, Shelter was suspended from office because he was mentally inadequate. He views homeless people and junkies as waste, and therefore, he thinks it will not bother anyone if he disposes of the waste. With the bodies he wants to set up his own army, the Camden Horizontal. Since his act is prohibited by law, Shelter tries to leave no traces by hiding the corpses underneath the fridge-like hole under his flat, so the bodies will not be discovered or rot. Obsessed by the idea, he buys a cat, which he christens Sappho to make him appear as a kind man. Shelter plans each murder meticulously, and has even studied ways of smiling in order to convince people to follow him. His Modus Operandi is to approach a homeless person at night, lure them into his apartment either by offering a place to sleep and some warm soup or eliciting sexual services from them, and then murdering them there. In an effort to diverse in his killings, Shelter's targets all races and genders. One day, Shelter meets Link and Ginger, and declines to give them money when they beg from him but suggests for them to join the army. Shelter hears them laugh as he walks away, and thinks they were making fun of him, so he decides to make them his next victims. It then emerges that Ginger had come back from visiting his friends and tried to find Link, and Shelter had convinced him he'd hit Link with his car and had taken him back to his home. Ginger, enraged, had demanded to go and see Link, and gone straight into Shelter's house, where Shelter killed him. Shelter then makes plans to murder Link.

Link is first drawn to Shelter, when he meets a man, who shows him a picture of Toya, a girl that Link realizes is an old friend of Ginger's and learns that the man is her father, and has to come to London in search for Toya. He learns that the man has asked other homeless people and they told him that she was last seen her leaving with another man. Link finds Shelter's house and observes it, but doesn't see anything. He ends up getting into an argument with Gail, bringing up the fact that she constantly wastes their money phoning her sister. Gail leaves and Link then encounters Shelter, who cannot believe his luck, and invites Link in for some soup and a bed for the night. Inside, Link becomes suspicious and then notices the watch that had been taken away from him some weeks earlier, at that moment Shelter attacks him. However, Link is stronger than he looks, and fights back. The police then arrive, having been called by Gail, who had seen Link entering the premises shortly after their argument. Shelter is arrested and dragged off to prison, so Gail then confesses that she is an undercover reporter, and that she had been doing research into homelessness. Upset at the harm she caused Link, Gail gives him a handful of notes before getting into a car with her friend and driving away. Watching her go, Link sadly pockets the money and questions to himself whether justice was really done since Shelter will get a roof over his head, a warm bed and three meals a day while in prison, while he doesn't. Deciding to make a new fresh start, Link packs up his few belongings and decides to leave Camden.