Shot in washed-out blues and greens, it's a bleakly depressing look at what we might think of as Lord of the Flies territory with added violence.
These sort of stories overwhelmingly remind me of Alan Clarke's grippingly unpleasant film, Scum, one of Ray Winstone's earliest outings as a star, the, er, Daddy of all youth prison movies.
But whereas Scum had the shock of another corner of the evil side of British life being exposed, Picco just treads over oh-so-familiar ground but with the added unpleasantness of contemporary cinema's fascination with the new genre of torture-porn.
These movies carry with them the unspoken promise of compensation -- if the film is shite, at least you'll get to see lots of fit lads naked in the compulsory shower scenes -- but even here Picco disappoints, carefully framing shots so barely a hint of winkie can be seen.
There's an intensely weird set of values at play, here, where we can have lingering close-ups of a tormented and probably mentally ill youth being tortured to death, but we're not allowed to look at a penis because that might bring down civilisation as we know it.
You can tell I wasn't overly impressed with Picco, can't you?
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