Since I’ve become a dad, films about babies creep me out, films about poverty are off-putting and violent films make my skin crawl.

Turtles Can Fly is undoubtedly the most creepy, off-putting film that made my skin crawl, but Tsotsi, the Gavin Wood directed film set in a South African ghetto, comes really close.

Tsotsi is the leader of a three-man stick-up crew. After a botched commuter train robbery in which the victim dies a gruesome but silent death, the small posse disbands and Tostsi sets off on his own.

He’s a Robin Hood character that got the stealing from the rich part of his act down, but does not embrace giving to the poor.

For his first solo job Tsotsi, more boy than man, car jacks a woman entering her upscale home. Unable to properly pilot the vehicle he crashes into a pole on a desolate street and discovers that there is an infant strapped in the back seat. And thus begins the saga.

Tsotsi decides to me the dad he never had, but a child himself, he has no experience with infants. He transports the baby in a paper shopping bag, offers a can of condensed milk when the baby cries (which results in ants infesting the bag) and forces a young mother to breastfeed the child at gunpoint.

The ending is predictable, but the body of the film with its surreal cinematic quality, is an excellent, though fictional, portrayal of strife in Johannesburg.

Think Two Men And A Baby starring the favela youth from City Of God and you will come close to the plot and cinematography of Tsotsi.