Category: Murder mystery

My Cousin Rachel (2017)


Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin in a dance of romance and suspicion in My Cousin Rachel

Director: Roger Michell

Cast: Rachel Weisz (Rachel Ashley), Sam Claflin (Philip Ashley), Iain Glen (Nick Kendall), Holliday Grainger (Louise Kendall), Simon Russell Beale (Court), Pierfrancesca Favino (Enrico Rainaldi), Andrew Havill (Parson Pascoe), Andrew Knott (Joshua)

Did she? Didn’t she? That’s the key phrase this deliberately ambiguous film returns to again and again. Is Cousin Rachel a serial schemer, seductress and possible murderer? Or is she just – well I guess just really unlucky? It’s a difficult line to tread –ambiguity is extremely challenging to bring to film, as it’s a medium that’s pretty decisive in what it shows us first-hand. But My Cousin Rachel pulls this off with a creepy aplomb.

At some point in the 1830s, Philip Ashley (Sam Claflin) receives a letter from his cousin and guardian Ambrose, who has recently passed away in Italy. The letter obliquely accuses Ambrose’s wife, his cousin Rachel (Rachel Weisz), whom Philip has never met, of poisoning Ambrose. As Ambrose died before he could prepare a new will, Philip inherits his estate – but still harbours a rage against Rachel, suspecting her of murder. However, when Rachel comes to stay with him, Philip finds himself increasingly drawn towards, and besotted with, her.

Roger Michell gracefully directs and writes this intriguing little mood piece, a fine chamber-piece thriller. With an unsettlingly lyrical score and shot with a beautiful eye for the Cornish countryside, My Cousin Rachel not only grips, but rings true with anyone who has either (a) fallen blindly in love, (b) suffered from romantic obsession or (c) been paralysed with jealousy. Which is probably just about everyone.

The film relies for its success largely on Rachel Weisz’s exceptionally intelligent and thoughtful performance as Rachel. She looks perfect for the role – she’s both the sort of woman men would fall wildly in love with, and old enough to settle into an unsettling, semi-incestuous flirtation with Philip. Her performance works because Weisz plays the part with exceptional skill, never tipping the wink to the audience, but skilfully modulating and adjusting her performance with every scene so that you remain as uncertain about her actions and motives as anyone else.

Apparently Weisz made her own mind up on Rachel’s guilt and innocence, but never told Michell or Claflin. Intriguing to think that while they shot scenes of domesticity or passion, that only one of those involved really knows what’s happening – a mood that totally carries across to the viewer. Weisz plays the part with complete strength of conviction and straightness – every scene is played as if the feelings in it were completely true and bereft of manipulation. She makes it unreadable, while having a face overflowing with emotion and feeling. Does she understand Philips feelings early and manipulate him? Or does she genuinely not expect his romantic intentions?

Michell skilfully shows how Rachel wins over people with ease. Even the dogs immediately gravitate towards her. Parson Parscoe and his family flock around her. Philip’s servants smarten themselves up and make every effort to make a good impression on her. His godfather Nick seems to oscillate continually in his judgement of her, but even he seems powerless in her presence. The camera carefully hovers and focuses in on Rachel, with many shots focusing on her face alone – seducing us as much as the rest of the characters. We almost never see her except in scenes with Philip – so we have the same information as he does for making our minds up.

Sam Claflin is equally key to the film as Philip. In many ways Philip is quite the whiny teenager – you could easily dismiss him as a romantic young idiot, an obsessive would-be Romeo, who makes a series of terrible decisions through listening to his penis rather than his head. But despite that –/ perhaps because his errors and mistakes seem so universal – it’s easy to sympathise with him. Rather than want to slap him anger, you want to do so in frustration – “don’t do that, you idiot!” Michell and Claflin play his increasing disintegration brilliantly. Is it poison? Or is it his increasing jealousy and obsession unhinging him? Who hasn’t been involved in an unequal romantic obsession?

It’s not a perfect film. Philip’s obsession with Rachel is alarmingly sudden – perhaps too sudden. Towards the end, Michell becomes slightly too enamoured with mystery – a final, lingering shot introduces an element of uncertainty about a character we have never had cause to suspect, which feels like a little too much. At times the lingering camera seems to be trying to suggest more in the performance than Weisz seems willing to give away.

But these are quibbles. The film is well-directed and filmed, and terrifically acted – Glen and Grainger are very good in key supporting roles – but it’s a triumph for Rachel Weisz. Weisz seems like an actor it’s easy to overlook, maybe because she has never quite got the star vehicles her talent matches – but this film is a clear reminder that, at her best, she is an extremely gifted performer.

Nocturnal Animals (2016)


Amy Adams does a lot of reading and thinking in Tom Ford’s intriguing part thriller, part strange romance, part memory saga Nocturnal Animals

Director: Tom Ford

Cast: Amy Adams (Susan Morrow), Jake Gyllenhaal (Edward Sheffield/Tony Hastings), Michael Shannon (Detective Bobby Andes), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Ray Marcus), Isla Fisher (Laura Hastings), Ellie Bamber (India Hastings), Armie Hammer (Hutton Murrow), Laura Linney (Anne Sutton), Andrea Riseborough (Alessia Holt), Michael Sheen (Carlos Holt)

Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is a society wife, running art galleries and married to an increasingly uninterested husband (Armie Hammer). One day she receives a copy of a manuscript from her ex-husband, Edward Sheffield (Jack Gyllenhaal). The book, while sensitive and from the heart, is also terrifying and visceral, and speaks to her in a way few things in her life have. It makes her begin to question her own choices. We see the story of the novel played out – Tony Hastings (Gyllenhaal again) and his wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) are waylaid late at night on an abandoned road by a violent local (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) – tragedy ensues.

It would be easy to say Nocturnal Animals is a stylish film that favours beauty over substance. But that would be untrue – Tom Ford has crafted a dynamically structured, intriguing puzzle, open to (and ripe for) discussion and reinterpretation over and over again. The film teases us with uncertainty and ambiguity, but it manages to avoid slipping into heavy-handed pretension. It leaves us with things unsaid, presenting parallel narratives and inviting us to mix and match them to create our own understanding. Ford’s skill is to not always present a definitive answer for how the book plot we are watching is meant to reflect on the plotline of the real world.

Ford is really good at distinguishing between the fiction and the reality. The world of Edward’s story is heightened in nearly every way, in a broad Western setting, while Morrow’s “real world” is cooler and contained, set in chilly apartment rooms or icy modern galleries or homes. The intercutting between the two is skilfully done, perfectly paced, never confusing or jarringly pulling us suddenly from one reality to another. The film avoids making obvious visual crossovers and links between the two (bar once – a moment that doesn’t really work), leaving the interpretation up to the viewer.

The story-within-a-story has a heightened tension, sometimes difficult to watch, not least in the road-rage incident that opens it. This sequence is almost unbearable in its whipper-cracker tension, with a threat of physical and sexual violence in every moment. The horror is almost palpable, sold a lot by Gyllenhaal’s struggles to control his panic and fear. Taylor-Johnson plays the demonic bully with an overblown operatic intensity, a hyper-real flamboyance that works well because it serves as a contrast with the grounded elements in the real story. It also adds to the sense of horror throughout this whole chilling sequence. Who hasn’t felt fear of being pulled over in a road in the middle of nowhere by terrifying, aggressive young men?

But all the elements of the story-within-a-story are cleverly balanced literary flourishes, carefully designed to appear just a little too close to “drama”, than those of the real world. Michael Shannon – a hard-boiled slice of charisma, he’s very good – is basically a stock character, repackaged with depth, but very much the sort of character you would find in a film rather than real life. Gyllenhaal’s Hastings similarly has the sort of moral conundrum and intense grief that feel that they belong more to a character from literary fiction than real life. The events of this story have a ferocious hyper-real intensity to them. Events in the story-within-a-story has a carefully constructed sense of dramatic irony.

By comparison, the “real world” is almost deliberately low-key and humdrum –minor affairs, and small but telling secrets, lives that are stuck in dull ruts or unimaginative cul-de-sacs. Amy Adams gives a complex and fascinating performance, much of which is essentially her reacting to things she is reading. It’s a performance that reeks of regret, of a woman unhappy in the choices she’s made, but too in love with the advantages they’ve brought to risk changing. She’s so set in the conventionality of life she seems unable to even imagine using her independence to break free.

The film teases us by misleading us about the parallels between the characters in the real world and those in the story. Ford playfully implies at first what we are watching may be partly true, and invites us to wonder what may be invention and what might have actually happened in real life. Alongside that, he also uses the double casting of Gyllenhaal to demonstrate the self-identification writers have for their characters. How much does Sheffield see himself in Hastings – and how much do the events that occur to Hastings, suggest a self-loathing in Sheffield? Again it’s all left to our own invention and imagination. We get flashbacks to past events in the real world that serve to both broaden our understanding and make us question our preconceptions. 

The film builds towards a conclusion that is equally open. Despite its horrendous content in the story-within-a-story, there is a romantic longing in this film, a sense of a life not lived – and a hope for the future. The final sequence is completely open to interpretation – you could equally see it as hopeful (as Ford sees it) or bleak (as most audience members do) – I probably incline more to the latter, but that might just be me. Everyone though will think something a little different depending on what they see, and how they interpret it – the film doesn’t labour the points it makes or push you too far in any direction.

Nocturnal Animals is an intriguing experiment in form and content that works extremely well. It’s powered by some terrific performances and shot with grace and beauty by Ford. This is Ford really flexing his muscles as an artist of film, and he borrows liberally from Lynch to Hitchcock. Ford has a brilliant eye for composition and form and his editing is masterful. He gives his work a lyrical musicality, a sense of balance and rhythm – he’s also a fine, subtle writer and avoids the crudity of the showman. He’s a fine film maker, and Nocturnal Animals is an intriguing, at times hard to watch, but fascinating film that grabs hold of you and doesn’t let go.

The Deadly Affair (1966)


James Mason deals with marital and professional deception and betrayal in spy thriller The Deadly Affair (in every meaning of the word!)

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: James Mason (Charles Dobbs), Maximilian Schell (Dieter Frey), Harriet Andersson (Ann Dobbs), Harry Andrews (Inspector Mendel), Simeone Signoret (Elsa Fennan), Kenneth Haigh (Bill Appleby), Roy Kinnear (Adam Scarr), Max Adrian (Adviser), Lynn Redgrave (Virgin), Robert Flemyng (Samuel Fennan), Corin Redgrave (David)

The Deadly Affair is a faithful adaptation of John Le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead, that first introduced to both Le Carré’s distinctive vision of espionage (a world where spying is a dirty, depressing business, miles away from Bond), and also his principal recurring hero George Smiley – although Smiley here is renamed Charles Dobbs (Paramount held the rights to several recurring Le Carré characters as it was making The Spy Who Came in From the Cold). The Deadly Affair often gets forgotten in the list of Le Carré films, which is unfair – this is a fine, gripping, character-led thriller.

Charles Dobbs (James Mason), a senior case officer in British intelligence, meets with Samuel Fennan (Robert Flemyng): a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, who has been anonymously accused of being a Russian agent. Dobbs all but agrees to clear Fennan in a friendly meeting – only for Fennan to go home and commit suicide. Dobbs investigates, but quickly finds that the facts – and the story of Fennan’s wife Elsa (Simone Signoret) – don’t seem to tie up. Working with retired police inspector Mendel (Harry Andrews), Dobbs investigates further – against the wishes of his superiors. This also helps to distract Dobbs from his disastrous home life with his serially unfaithful wife Ann (Harriet Andersson) and her growing closeness to his old war friend Dieter Frey (Maximilian Schell).

The Deadly Affairhas an old-school, unflashy, Hollywood professionalism to it, very smoothly directed by Sidney Lumet. Lumet and photographer Frederick A. Young slightly exposed each shot of the film to give the colours a drained, murky quality, which works extraordinarily well for the grimy Le Carré feeling. Lumet uses a series of careful POV and shot-reverse-shots to involve the audience neatly in the action – we are nearly always seeing events from someone’s perspective, and this helps us empathise with the characters and action. He also uses London locations expertly – everywhere is carefully chosen and shot for maximum impact, creating a world of dingy backstreets that perfectly matches the feeling of the story.

It also helps that Lumet changes very little from what was already an excellent source novel. It’s an intricate “whodunnit” puzzle, twisty and challenging enough to keep the audience guessing. What the film does really well is introduce Dobbs’ wife Ann as a central character in the storyline, and to make marital betrayal and deception a complementary subplot, alongside Dobbs’ involvement in the world of professional bluff and counter-bluff: during the day he practises the very same deception that pains him so much at home. (Le Carré would effectively lift some of the ideas of this film adaptation and reproduce them in later books, most especially Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy.)

This marital disharmony becomes a key theme in the movie – two people who are totally reliant on each other but can’t seem to stop hurting each other. Ann is in many ways the hellish wife – serially unfaithful and largely unrepentant – but Dobbs is equally difficult, unnervingly patient and silently (but never vocally or perhaps even consciously) judgemental. They have a complex arrangement, but also a clear understanding of each other, and their conversations sound like careful, familiar routines. Like a scab, Dobbs keeps picking at this wound of his wife’s infidelity – early in the film he returns home after a late call out to find his wife naked in bed. She rises to greet him provocatively, and they kiss, but Dobbs seemingly can’t let go of his own sense of impotence. Later Ann demands Dobbs expresses some rage and jealousy – as if looking for him to show some sort of feeling.

It’s a neat sub-plot for a film that focuses on a series of major personal and professional betrayals – I counted no fewer than five over the course of the film but there are probably more depending on how you define it – and which shows how spying can become wrapped up in personal affairs. Despite Dobbs’ apparent pride at treating his work with a determined coolness, everything is so very personal in this film. Characters react often with emotions rather than cool rational thinking – with the exception of one character who uses the emotions of others very rationally to manipulate them. Even the final confrontation of the film has a sad loss of emotional control at the centre of it – and leads to actions bitterly regretted by the survivors.

 

James Mason is very good as Dobbs, buttoned-up but slightly run-down, a man who presents a face of calm control and wisdom to the world, but at home is an insecure, deeply pained, impotent mess. Determined and principled in the world of espionage, he is hopelessly in love with his wife, to the extent of practically allowing her free rein to do as she wishes. Despite being in nearly every scene, it’s also a very generous performance, quiet and unshowy, that often cedes the scene to his partners. Harriet Andersson (though clearly dubbed) manages to make Ann someone who feels sympathetic and understandable – even though she is a colossal pain.

Lumet also gets some wonderful performances from the rest of the cast, not least from Harry Andrews who I think steals the movie as a narcoleptic Inspector Mendel, obsessed with facts and possessed of a dry professionalism. The film also gives a gift of a role to Simeone Signoret, a woman with a troubled past and indeterminate motives, bubbling with guilt and resentment. She is given no less than three tour-de-force scenes (one played almost in complete silence) and plays each brilliantly. There are neat cameos as well from Max Adrian (as a campy popinjay running Dobbs’ department) and Lynn Redgrave as an eager stagehand for an amateur theatre company with some vital evidence. 

The film’s conclusion revolves around two masterfully done sequences: one during a performance of Edward II (by the real Royal Shakespeare Company – spot several familiar actors on stage), the second an emotional confrontation at a dock that erupts into violence. It’s a wonderful dwelling on betrayal and its impacts. It also works an absolute treat as a low-key counterpart to Bond at his Swinging Sixties height, while still packing a jazzy score from Quincy Jones (which at first seems completely incongruous but actually helps to establish the mood really well). Directed with professional assurance with a host of fine performances – it’s a little bit of an overlooked gem.

Murder on the Orient Express (2017)


A dishevelled Kenneth Branagh (and tache) investigates a Murder on the Orient Express

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Cast: Kenneth Branagh (Hercule Poirot), Tom Bateman (Bouc), Penélope Cruz (Pilar Estravados), Willem Dafoe (Gerhard Hardman), Judi Dench (Princess Dragomiroff), Johnny Depp (Samuel Ratchett), Josh Gad (Hector MacQueen), Derek Jacobi (Edward Masterman), Leslie Odom Jnr (Dr Arbuthnot), Michelle Pfeiffer (Caroline Hubbard), Daisy Ridley (Mary Debenham), Marwan Kenzari (Pierre Michel), Olivia Colman (Hildegarde Schmidt), Lucy Boynton (Countess Elena Andrenyi), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (Biniamino Marquez), Sergei Polunin (Count Rudolph Andrenyi), Miranda Raison (Sonia Armstrong)

Is there a murder mystery with a more widely known resolution than Murder on the Orient Express? Possibly not – if for no other reason that film and television versions of this story are as numerous as the suspects in the actual mystery. If that wasn’t a big enough challenge for Branagh to take on, he also joins a list of umpteen actors to play Poirot himself: following in the (very precise) footsteps of the big guns: Finney, Ustinov and of course, above all, David Suchet. How does his version of this most famous detective in his most famous adventure measure up? Well, with mixed results.

For those who don’t know, Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) is “possibly the world’s greatest detective”. Here, he is travelling back from Istanbul  on the Orient Express, a berth having being secured at the last minute by his friend Bouc (Tom Bateman) the director of the line. En route he is approached by the sinister Ratchett (Johnny Depp), who asks if he can serve as his bodyguard. Poirot refuses – only for Ratchett to be murdered that night. Bouc asks Poirot to investigate – and it soon becomes clear that the dozen other passengers in Ratchett’s carriage could all have had motives to kill him. But who is the killer?

Murder on the Orient Express is on the cusp of being a very good film. But, like the train itself, it gets bogged down too often in changes from the source material that add nothing, action scenes that feel toe-curlingly out of place, and bombastic filming that goes a little bit too far. In many ways it captures some of the faults of its director, my much-loved hero Kenneth Branagh – and I do love him, but as a director he has a tendency to make things too big, to wear his love of the complex shot on his sleeve; to basically try too hard. As a director, that’s what it feels like he’s doing here.

It’s filmed with a luscious, chocolate box, old-school Hollywood grandeur. The camera swoops and zooms over some gorgeous landscape as the train puffs through snowy mountain scenery. There are some loving travelogue tracking shots of Istanbul and Jerusalem. The film lingers with a loving eye on the luxury and class of the Orient Express itself (including some egregiously clunky product placement). The costumes look lovely.  But the end result of all this lavish filming is that it sometimes goes too far towards the reassuring, Boxing-Day-afternoon treat. 

Everything is a little too technicolour at points. It also means that some of Branagh’s more self-consciously tricksy camera work stands out a little too much. A “birds-eye” view of the discovery of the body (the camera above the heads of the actors looking straight down) is oddly disconnecting – it works a lot better when Poirot and Bouc examine the crime scene, giving the audience a god like view of the scene. Some overly complicated shots swoop up along the aqueduct where the train is stuck, past Poirot speaking to characters, then over the top of the train. It’s a rather too overblown and clumsy attempt to make a conversation seem cinematic – it feels a little forced.

It’s one of many points where the film feels like it is trying too hard to make the story edgier or more overtly cinematic. Not the least of these are sequences that up the action quotient. I feel very confident this is the first Poirot film you’ll ever see where the hero is involved in not one but two dynamic fights. One of these is a bizarre chase down the aqueduct with Poirot and another character. The second involves gunfire (an effective shock to be fair) and Poirot using his cane as a weapon in hand-to-hand combat. 

There is nothing wrong with making Poirot more active – Branagh’s character is very much the ex-soldier and policeman, busting open the door to Ratchett’s berth to investigate, walking over the train’s roof, brow-beating the odd suspect (at one point at gun point). It’s just all too much – what audience is this playing to? Who really goes to a Poirot film expecting a goddamn fight scene? Even Count Andrenyi is introduced ninja-kickboxing photographers (I’m not joking here) – is this really what Agatha Christie would have wanted?

There are some odd choices made to deepen Poirot’s character. He is given some sort of lost romantic interest – no less than four times in the film he is given scenes where he holds a photo and bemoans “mon cher Kat-a-rean”. In the opening sequence, Poirot’s love of symmetry is introduced by him accidentally stepping in a cow pat and then stepping in it with his other foot to make each equal. Not only does a “stepping in shit” joke seem wildly out of place, but I don’t believe someone as fastidious and observant as Poirot would even step in it in the first place, let alone choose to step into it twice.

The train doesn’t just stop, it’s nearly taken out by an avalanche. A knife isn’t just discovered, it’s literally found stabbed into a character’s back. Characters have been changed to allow a more diverse cast – which I applaud – but making Arbuthnot a soldier turned doctor is a change that makes very little sense. The claustrophobia of the original is lost by having workers turn up almost immediately to dig the train out. Several scenes are filmed outside, with workers surrounding the train digging it out. Some of these undermine the original or are a little silly.

The suspect assemble

But I’m being really hard on this film because there are major flashes of promise here. Not least in Branagh’s performance as Poirot. I’m very confident in saying that, after David Suchet of course, this is the second best Poirot committed to film. The first thing anyone will notice is of course the moustache. Yes it looks absurd, but you attune to it quickly. It’s also a plot point: Poirot uses it, and his eccentricities, to lure people (Columbo style) into a false sense of security. When the film relaxes into just letting Poirot investigate (and hues closer to the original), Branagh gives Poirot a warm humanity and gentleness. His eyes are a wonder – intense disks of sadness. 

Branagh gives Poirot a love of order and justice that defines his world view – and the film introduces a moral conundrum for Poirot in the solution of the crime. I would say David Suchet’s TV version did this better – stressing Poirot’s Catholicism and belief in the rule of law as major factors that conflict him when confronted with the solution. But Branagh captures a real sense of Poirot’s conflict (even if the solution reveal is overplayed and overshot – right down to a “last supper” style tableaux in a railway tunnel) and his sadness, confusion and decency are really lovely – there is even a very neat touch with him forgetting to straight and smarten his appearance, as he deals with the ramifications of his solution to the murder. He looks like cartoon character, but he makes Poirot a real man. I would definitely like to see him do the role again.

The rest of the all-star cast rather struggle for crumbs, as the focus remains solidly on Poirot (largely because the film is intended as the possible first in a series). Tom Bateman is excellent as Bouc, charming and endearing but also given a character arc that sees him develop and change. Of the stars, Depp is suitably grimy as Ratchett, Pfeiffer imperiously stylish and skittish as Hubbard and Odum Jnr affecting as Arbuthnot. I was very taken with Daisy Ridley’s Mary Debenham, a young charm hiding steel underneath. Dafoe, Dench, Colman, Jacobi and the rest are given little to do but are reliably excellent when they are. Others like Cruz feel wasted. 

When the film focuses on Poirot simply investigating, it is very good. Each interrogation of the passengers is brilliantly played by Branagh – Poirot subtly adjusting his methods and approach depending on the person he is talking to. Poirot’s introduction sequence in Jerusalem has a playful Sherlock feel to it: Poirot solving a crime in seconds (having been dragged from his hotel, where he pickily demands eggs that are perfectly equal), including accurately predicting how the criminal will try and escape. There are lots of lovely moments – but just when you settle down to enjoy it, something wildly over-the-top or silly happens.

Murder on the Orient Express is by no stretch of the imagination a bad movie. In some places, it’s charming and a lot of fun. If it’s designed for watching on a bank holiday afternoon it works very well. But it’s, at best, the third best version of this story on film (after the 1974 Lumet film and the Suchet TV version). Do we really need to watch the third best version of an already familiar story? If we could transplant Branagh’s performance into Lumet’s film, now that would be something. But as it is, we’ve got a decent if flawed film that just tries too hard to do too much.

Les Diaboliques (1955)


Véra Clouzot and Simeone Signoret plot murder in twisty thriller Les Diaboliques

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Cast: Simeone Signoret (Nicole Horner), Véra Clouzot (Christina Delassalle), Paul Meurisse (Michel Delassalle), Charles Vanel (Alfred Fichet), Jean Brochard (Plantivaeu), Pierre Larquery (Drain), Michel Serrault (Raymond)

Clouzot is one of those fine directors, less prominent today in the list of the great artists of cinema. This might be because, unlike some of his contemporaries, many of his films were unashamed thrillers, Hitchcockian suspense tales, rather than the serious, artistic films we associate with French cinema. Les Diaboliques is the most popular of these films, a part mystery, part horror drama which slowly builds a confusingly terrifying picture of murder, danger and betrayal.

Christina (Véra Clouzot) is the wife of Paul (Michel Delassalle), a sadistic, bullying nightmare of a man. Together they run a boarding school, set up by her inheritance, but their marriage is a disaster. Paul is openly conducting an affair with fellow teacher Nicole (Simone Signoret). Nicole, however, is as disgusted and contemptuous of Paul as Christina – and she eventually persuades her that they should consider ridding themselves of Paul, with a temptingly simple scheme. However, things swiftly go against their plans…

Les Diaboliques is a compelling psychological thriller cum horror story, a creepy slow-burn of suggestion and paranoia that unfolds a bizarre whodunit mystery, which unnerves and constantly leaves you guessing. The story unfolds at a measured, inexorable pace. Clouzot’s camera is a quiet and carefully placed observer, taking in the events that occur in this hellishly cruel school with a calm directness, a cool minimalism that lets them speak for themselves.

And it’s a pretty hellish school. Paul is a brutal tyrant and bully, the teachers and students alternating between fear and loathing for him. He treats his fragile wife (struggling with a heart condition that could end her life at any moment) with a casual disregard and cruelty. Poor Christina is so put-upon and crushed, she seems wearily accepting of her husband’s constant affairs intermixed with cruelty. Even his mistress (an imperiously cold, harshly determined Simeone Signoret) can’t stand him. The whole school seems to have felt the effect of Paul’s personality – its run down, crushed, disheartened. The other teachers are either disinterested, faintly criminal or both. Is it any wonder wife and mistress want to murder him?

The murder, when it comes (and it’s the best part of half way through the movie) is almost blandly low-key. Clouzot even partly intercuts it with next-door neighbours complaining about the hot water being run late at night, the sound disturbing their radio quiz – unaware that it’s filling the bath so the two women can drown a drugged Paul. The flat where the crime occurs is as low-key and shabby as most of the rest of the film’s locations. 

Fascinatingly, what emerges increasingly are the lesbian undertones to the relationship between Nicole and Christina. Their intimacy is a major part of the build-up to the murder – their conspiratorial closeness seems as much as a careful seduction of Christina by Nicole as it is two like-minded souls coming together (this feeling, by the way, really comes into play as the film reach its conclusion). As events spiral out of control, Nicole becomes more and more of a protective, husbandly figure over the fragile Christina (an intriguing performance of vulnerability from Clouzot’s wife Véra), their physical and emotional closeness making them feel more and more like lovers dispatching a husband, rather than allies of convenience. It’s an intriguing subtext to the film, that I feel will make it of more and more interest as time goes on.

Events certainly do spiral out of control, as the body carefully placed in the swimming pool by the murderers (hoping to give the impression that Paul has accidentally drowned) is never discovered. Is it in the pool at all? Is Paul dead? Or has someone taken the body? A string of increasingly unnerving deliveries and visitations occurs – is Paul somehow speaking from the dead? Or are forces unknown manipulating the killers to disaster? Clouzot lets these events slowly build, avoiding the temptation to sprinkle clues or – more importantly – to give the audience more clues than the characters. We are only ever shown what Christine and Nicole see and only get the information they get.

This is where the film introduces its fourth primary character, retired detective Alfred Fichet. Fichet’s ambling, scruffy, seeming absent-mindedness makes him an eerily accurate forerunner of Colombo (at one point he all but says “just one more thing”). He rolls from place to place, clearly much sharper than he appears – it’s an impressively charismatic performance from Charles Vanel. He manages to work out what has happened (or perhaps what is happening) before the end – but moves too slowly in order to prevent disaster. But he changes the dynamic of the film in an intriguing way – shaking the film up 2/3rds of the way in, a tribute to the invention of its writing.

The final reveal of the plot is tinged with a horrifying terror – shot with an intense, watery fear that is guaranteed to haunt the memory. To say more is to reveal too much of an excellent act four twist. But it’s a sequence that you will find hard to shake from your mind – and one that you later realise the whole film was building towards. It’s what has led many people to call this film partly a horror story.

Clouzot’s film is a fine twisty thriller, even if at times it feels a little too in love with the mechanics of its tricks and plot mechanisms than it is with emotion and character. But it creates some intriguing and effective characters (including some small cameos) and it feels like a film that genuinely teaches us about the casual cruelty and selfishness that drives so many of our actions. There are many, many lies told in the film – even the children at the school casually lie – this is not a film that has a high opinion of the human race. 

Les Diaboliques has been called the greatest Hitchcock film Hitch never made. Hitch might well have brought a bit more flash and punch in its style (Clouzot is not the most inventive user of the camera here, with most shots very safe). But I’m not sure he could have improved its sense of creeping inevitability and grim claustrophobia. It still packs an inventive, clever and intriguing punch even today.

Lost Highway (1997)


Bill Pullman goes out of his mind in David Lynch’s deliberately weird Lost Highway

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Bill Pullman (Fred Madison), Patricia Arquette (Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield), Balthazar Getty (Pete Dayton), Robert Loggia (Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent), Robert Blake (The Mystery Man), Gary Busey (Bill Dayton), Lucy Butler (Candace Dayton), Michael Massee (Andy), Richard Pryor (Arnie)

It wouldn’t be a David Lynch film unless the plot was impossible to explain, but here goes. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) marriage is on the rocks. The couple start receiving packages containing camcorder videos of their home. These videos become increasingly more and more personal and intimate. The final video shows Fred murdering Renee. Imprisoned, Fred suffers from headaches and then overnight he transforms into another person, Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). Released back into the world, Dayton encounters the glamorous Alice Wakefield (Arquette again). Then things get even weirder. Yup that’s right: weirder.

Lost Highway is probably Lynch at his most obscure and baffling. Like a lot of Lynch films, it’s a question of taste. What do you want to get out of a film? If it’s a puzzling mystery then this might be the film for you. Lost Highway is like an impossible jigsaw, or a landscape with no frame of reference: trying to judge what the overall actual picture is, is nearly impossible. Traditional film making elements, such as story and character, are subservient here.

So whether you like Lost Highway will probably come down to how much you are willing to accept everything you see is constantly being dismantled and repositioned by the film. It strikes a less successful balance between this “Lynchian” material and more traditional storytelling than Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive (both, I would argue, superior films). However, for those willing to run with a mystery, Lost Highway is a baffling but intriguing watch – unsettling, unnerving, but fascinating.

So what is it about? Now I confess I needed to read up a little bit, but the best way to understand the film is as some sort of elliptical, dreamlike fantasy created by its lead character. It seems pretty clear that the majority of the film is, at best, subjective recollection or out-and-out fantasy. A little too much attention is paid in the film to a line from Fred Madison that he dislikes video cameras as he prefers to “remember things my own way rather than how they happened”. A fairly on-the-nose statement, but a clear mission statement for a film if I ever I saw one.

In fact, Fred Madison is so keen to remember the world only as he sees it that, he literally becomes someone else to build some sort of internal fantasy world where he can win the girl. But Fred/Pete is such a screwed up, confused person he can’t even get his own fantasy world right –impressions from the real world keep draining in. At least, that’s a fair interpretation. The film of course deliberately keeps things open: is this some fantasy Fred has while trapped in his cell? Or is there some sort of metaphysical transformation that fades into the real world? Is there an element of this story being circular and self-perpetuating? Is there any reality to it at all? How much you engage with these questions is a pretty good indication of what you’ll make of this film.

Whatever your response to it, as a piece of film-making it’s a very impressive piece of work. All the usual Lynchian touches are here: the strident and discordant lighting at key moments, the intelligent and daring use of music, the intermingling of design from the modern world and Americana of the 1950s, not to mention the moments of extreme violence and graphic sex. Lynch uses unsettling camera angles and sudden tilts of angle and sound to constantly keep the audience on their toes and questioning what they are seeing. Disturbing and haunting imagery, a testament to Lynch’s painter’s eye, is perfectly judged. Confusing as this film is, it offers a parade of intriguing images.

It’s an important landmark in Lynch’s filmography: a flowering of ideas he had been dabbling with since Twin Peaks, of mysticism, perversion and human darkness, and a jumping off point for haunting, almost illogical films to come like Mulholland Drive. The Mystery Man (unsettlingly played by Robert Blake – not least as this is the last film Blake made before his conviction for murdering his own wife) is a haunting, perfect Lynchian character – unsettling in appearance and confusing in intention. Is he a real person, or a mystical force? Is he some sort of external expression of evil driving Fred on, or is he part of Fred’s fractured mind?

Patricia Arquette plays two very different femme fatales, but to what extent are they reimaginings or reversionings of each other? It’s a very good performance from Arquette, playing someone who is not quite a real person, nor quite a fantasy, who feels like a character from a film moving into a real world, which itself is probably a fantasy. Just writing this sentence shows what a crazy film this is.

For the rest of the performances, there is a good mix of the genuine and the artificial. Bill Pullman, at his most understated, is perfect to ground the film, while Balthazar Getty gives a fine, detailed performance as a character who is similar and slightly different to Fred. Robert Loggia mixes ferocity and a bizarre tenderness as a character who may or not be a foul-mouthed gangster. These performances add a level of heart to the film, allowing a bit for freedom for the strangeness.

Lynch’s Lost Highway isn’t a masterpiece – it’s perhaps too self-consciously oddball and unusual, too reliant on mood and atmosphere to make up for its lack of story and characterisation. It is however intriguing, a brilliant puzzle, even though it doesn’t really allow you to invest emotionally in it at all. You can admire it as a mystery, but you can never really open your heart to it. It’s a film that is daring and dangerous, but it’s also one that, for all its erotic sex and tortured psyches, never really feels like it’s about real people with real feelings. It’s a mixture that, as I’ve said, works better in Mulholland Drive. But this is a very good staging post to that film.

Double Indemnity (1944)

Barbara Stanwyck is the dark force beyond Fred MacMurray in Wilder’s classic Double Indemnity

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Fred MacMurray (Walter Neff), Barbara Stanwyck (Phyllis Dietrichson), Edward G. Robinson (Barton Keyes), Porter Hall (Mr Jackson), Jean Heather (Lola Dietrichson), Tom Powers (Mr Dietrichson), Bryon Barr (Nina Zachett), Richard Gaines (Edward Norton)

In the wake of the Second World War, morally complex and dark (in every sense of the word) stories spoke to a nation coming to terms with what it had been through. Out of this was born a new genre: film noir. Double Indemnity might just be the best example and one of Billy Wilder’s best films.

Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is a bored insurance salesman, smitten with the sexually alluring Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), wife of a potential client. When she suggests that, with his help, they could get rid of her husband and collect a massive insurance payout on his death, Neff is quickly won over. But murder is a hard thing to get away with – particularly when Neff’s colleague and close friend Barton Keyes (Edward G Robinson), the best investigator in the business, smells something amiss in the ‘accident’.

Double Indemnity is one of those films that it’s easy to forget was as influential as it was, precisely because it’s narrative and filmic techniques have been so comprehensively imitated in a host of films since. But imagine: this was one of the very first real film noirs. It was one of the first films that used shadows and darkness as effectively as this to reflect mood and atmosphere. It was the one of the first films to use a femme fatale as prominently (and unapologetically) as this. It’s also one of the first films where sex permeates almost everything you see in the picture.

Phyllis is a woman who understands the power of sensuality, who is well aware of how she can use her body and aloof mystery to get what she wants out of men. But even more than that, Stanwyck’s wonderfully cold performance suggests she hardly seems to care about anything at all: in fact the impression is almost that she is locked into moving forward, passing through husbands and lovers, leaving men dead on the wayside. That’s the magic of Stanwyck in this film: can you remember a character as unremittingly, unapologetically sinful, manipulative and conscience-free as this?

Of course Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff is the perfect rube for this fiercely intelligent and determined woman. MacMurray’s slight B-movie blandness – his lack of star quality, his everyday, folky unimaginativeness – is perfect for the overconfident, slightly smarmy, laziness of Neff. It’s never said outright, but you suspect that the attraction of the danger Phyllis offers is escape from his own dull life. Does he love Phyllis? I would say almost certainly not – but is he horny for her? You better believe it. It’s a man on the cusp of a mid-life crisis getting a chance to throw himself into a sex-driven affair.

What do these two think of each other? Both of them seem barely capable of trusting each other, using sex and flirting almost as a filler between bouts of mutual suspicion. Does she care for him even a little behind her use of him? And does he feel anything like a bond with her inbetween the bouts of sex? They stumble so quickly into the plan that it almost feels like they are going through the motions – she is so used to manipulation and murder, it’s all she knows; he is so bored with his life that the excitement of violence and murder with his sex seems impossible to resist.

And Wilder lets sex run through this whole film. From Phyllis’ long descent down her flight of stairs at her first entrance to the irresistible anklet, everything about Stanwyck in this film is about the power of her sex. The dialogue exchanges between Neff and Phyllis crackle with magnetism. Later, Wilder skilfully shoots a sex scene without showing a thing: we cut from the two of them kissing on a sofa, to their positions shifted, Phyllis fixing her dress and Neff reclining smoking.

It helps that the dialogue is scintillating. Each exchange is packed with crackling and quotable lines. You get a perfect marriage here between Wilder’s acerbic cynicism and dry wit, and Raymond Chandler’s arch, spiky, carefully constructed dialogue, with its gritty poetry. I mean just watch the exchange here – perfection.

And they write some knock-out speeches too – but then you would if you had an actor as brilliant as Edward G. Robinson to deliver them.

Neff’s voiceover uses the technique where it should be used – not to tell us information any well informed viewer can already work out for themselves, but to allow us insight into Neff himself and his situation, that complements and develops our appreciation of the picture (it’s also beautifully well delivered by MacMurray). I’d also add it’s the same conceit as Sunset Boulevard – its lead character narrates the film mortally wounded – and it works just as well here, stressing the disaster that hangs over every action by our anti-heroes.

Added to this, the film looks beautiful. The shadows have an all-consuming inky depth. Cinematographer John Seitz is not afraid of turning the lights down and down, and the darkness absorbs and consumes the whole picture. It allows striking lighting effects – the blinds that seem to be in every room allow slits of light through them that draw lines across the faces and bodies of the actors (as many viewers have commented, it also has the effect of making half the characters appear like they are behind bars). The darkness looms in from the corners of the frame, trapping the leads into the action – and into their own disastrous decisions.

Wilder’s skilful camera placement is what makes this film really work. He presents action constantly in challenging and different ways, never doing the expected. During the actual murder (committed while Phyllis drives), the camera never looks at Neff committing the crime, but closely follows the look of almost sensual satisfaction on Phyllis’ face: she never once looks at what is happening in the seat next to her, but her face makes us experience the killing in an even more disturbingly intimate way than watching it would be.

But what makes this film truly brilliant and unique is that its main relationship isn’t even the one you expect. Neff and Phyllis may have an electric physical relationship, but the real romance in the film is between Neff and his colleague Keyes. These two share a deeply close and personal bond. Theirs is a friendship that skirts around a platonic romance – made sharper of course as Keyes is the only man who stands a chance of working out what exactly is going on. There is a fine visual motif throughout of Neff lighting matches (with his thumb!) for Keyes – a gesture that feels both manly and intimate.

Keyes is played by a career-best Edward G. Robinson. Robinson blazes through the big speeches – but with a confident skill that never makes them feel like showboating moments. He gives Keyes an eccentric brilliance, mixed with a delicate humanism. To be that good at sniffing out wrongdoing and deceit from his fellow men, you can’t help feeling that he must have a pretty good idea about what human fallibility feels like. It’s this warm human understanding that Robinson does so brilliantly. It’s also what helps to make this relationship so moving. It’s hard not to share the obvious awkward discomfort MacMurray gives to Neff when he feels as if he is letting down his friend, and betraying the trust between them.

It’s this that makes Double Indemnity stand out. It’s a film that’s actually about the relationship between two men – part friendship, part father-and-son, part romantic – their love for each other, which happens to have an irresistible femme fatale thrown into the middle. It feels like a very unique and different approach – a touch of Wilder magic if you will – that makes the film stand out. It’s also what lies behind the link it has with audiences, the human interest that makes you come back again and again to this film about two ruthless killers.

This is a film in which everyone was at their best. MacMurray never did anything again to match it, Stanwyck seized the part with such commitment that she spawned countless imitators, Robinson is just magnificent. Wilder’s direction is perfect, the film looks ravishing, the script is to die for. Double Indemnity may not only be the most influential film noir ever. It might also be the best.

The Girl on the Train (2016)


Emily Blunt on a commute into danger in the underwhelming Girl on the Train

Director: Tate Taylor

Cast: Emily Blunt (Rachel Watson), Rebecca Ferguson (Ann Watson), Haley Bennett (Megan Hipwell), Justin Theroux (Tom Watson), Luke Evans (Scott Hipwell), Allison Janney (DS Riley), Edgar Ramirez (Dr Kamal Abdic), Lisa Kudrow (Martha), Laura Prepon (Cathy)

Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt) is a lonely, divorced alcoholic who takes the train into New York every day to spy on her husband (Justin Theroux) and his new wife (Rebecca Ferguson), whose house the train passes. However, she also becomes obsessed with the seemingly happy marriage of her ex’s neighbours (Luke Evans and Haley Bennett), who live an apparently Instagram-perfect life of coffee on the balcony and candlelit sex in their perfect living room (with the curtains conveniently left open – everyone leaves their curtains open in this film, no matter what they are doing). When the picture-perfect wife goes missing, she inveigles her way into their lives to try and help.

This is not a good film. It’s not a terrible film, but it’s a flat and lifeless one – a plot-boiler that simmers along without ever really getting exciting.  The story feels like it’s been pulled together from crumbs swept from the table of Gillian Flynn. It’s a hotchpotch mess, tangled, unclear and not that interesting. I can’t be the only person un-intrigued by the mystery of who shags who among the middle classes. Even a murder doesn’t spice it up. The small cast makes many mysteries obvious – when one character is found to be pregnant, but two of the three male characters we’ve been introduced to have been ruled out, you don’t need to be Poirot to work out who the father might be. Even the title is a call back to better thrillers, with its Girl with the Dragon Tattoo styled title.

The story drifts on and on, never really getting anyway or explaining anything properly. It doesn’t help that it’s mediocrely filmed. Look at the lean, compelling and sharp film David Fincher made of (the much better) Gone Girl. Then look at the murky, plodding, dull execution here. Particularly damningly it’s a shock to find out this is less than 2 hours, because it feels a hell of a lot longer.

The story has been switched from the book’s original London to somewhere outside Manhattan, which doesn’t help either. There is something quite small scale and domestic about the story that the sweeping vistas and huge houses of wealthy American suburbia don’t match up with. The very concept of the film – seeing into houses from commuter trains paused at signals – doesn’t even work removed from London’s architecture (the train in this film stops regularly on a huge expanse of track due to rail works that go on for ever and ever). Edgar Ramirez’s psychiatrist keeps the name Kamal Abdic (with its suggestion of middle Eastern roots) but now seems to be Mexican. Everyone in the film looks like a fashion model. Lots of other small moments just don’t make sense in the way they would have done in the original setting.

Emily Blunt is pretty good in the lead role, much better than the film deserves. Okay the drop-dead gorgeous Blunt doesn’t even remotely look like the overweight, sweaty alcoholic described in the book. But she nails her drunk acting, and carries the emotional heft of the film rather well, with an engaging vulnerability. She is, perhaps, even a little too engaging – the book’s original version of her character is apparently pretty unlikeable. The script trims away her needy obsessiveness, and creepy stalker tendencies. But Blunt is a little too likeable, and a little too sophisticated (despite prosthetic eyebags), to really convince as the pathetic Rachel. The switch to America doesn’t help here either – basically Brits make better losers than Americans tend to.

The rest of the cast are okay, but there is hardly a stand out among them. I have to admit I found Haley Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson (with their identikit blond hair dyes) hard to tell apart at times (this may be due to staying up all night watching the 2017 British election the night before).

By the end, when the killer is revealed (with a graphically suggestive flashback) you’ll find it hard to really care. In fact the final reveal is so clumsily put together all the implications aren’t clear at all. It’s a load of fuss about nothing. Taylor is trying to turn a pulpy novel into an arty thriller – but he doesn’t have the cinematic know-how to do it. He’s far too bland and middlebrow. Maybe that makes him a suitable match – a derivative director for a derivative book – but it hardly helps make this a good film. If he’d gone for a more B-movie approach, playing up the dark satire you could find in the story, then we could have had something interesting here. But he didn’t and we don’t.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)


Laura Palmer and Dale Cooper trapped in Twin Peaks nightmare halfway house between this world and the next

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer), Ray Wise (Leland Palmer), Mädchen Amick (Shelly Johnson), Dana Ashbrook (Bobby Briggs), Phoebe Augustine (Ronette Pulaski), David Bowie (Phillip Jeffries), Eric Da Re (Leo Johnson), Miguel Ferrer (Albert Rosenfield), Pamela Gidley (Teresa Banks), Chris Isaak (Special Agent Chester Desmond), Moira Kelly (Donna Hayward), David Lynch (Gordon Cole), Kyle MacLachlan (Special Agent Dale Cooper), James Marshall (James Hurley), Frank Silva (BOB), Kiefer Sutherland (Agent Sam Stanley), Grace Zabriskie (Sarah Palmer)

Twin Peaks was a mystifying, but very short lived, sensation. Its first series gripped America with its whodunit mystery around who killed Laura Palmer: it was an early 90s Broadchurch with added mysticism and twisted Lynchian psychosis. Just like Broadchurch, the second series stumbled from disaster to disaster as the answer to the mystery was revealed. Though this plot line was dark, disturbing and haunting, effectively contrasted with the surreal humour of the rest of the show, large chunks of the episodes were, to be honest, terrible. As Lynch’s attention turned elsewhere, the show fumbled through half a season of increasingly bizarre, pointless, laughable and plain rubbish episodes, before rallying at the end with a return to the mysterious dwelling on the nature of evil that the series is now best remembered for.

Twin Peaks is a rare anomaly – a show whose most die-hard fans would probably admit at least a quarter of the episodes were terrible. Ratings had dropped off a cliff as the series went on (sure enough it was cancelled). The cast and crew knew the show had lost something – several actors, most notably Lara Flynn Boyle (here replaced by Moira Kelly) refused to appear in the film. Even the show’s star, and Lynch surrogate, Kyle MacLachlan only agreed to return for this film for a few brief scenes (requiring an urgent re-write). However, Lynch’s interest in the concept had clearly been awakened during his writing and filming of (what would become) the final episode, surely one of the most surreal, unsettling, bizarre, intriguing and disturbing episodes of TV ever screened.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was Lynch’s final reclaiming of the series from the toilet it had dropped into. It also served partly as a “retcon” to tie the foundations of the original series plotline into the mythology the show had deepened in its final few episodes (built upon many surreal elements Lynch had introduced in the first episodes, otherwise hinted at rather than explored). As much of this mythology was unsettling, this movie very much follows that mood, losing much (if not all) of the dark, surrealistic humour that contrasted the darkness so well in the series. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a strange movie that is more like an expanded extra episode of the series, rather than a stand-alone. It makes no attempt at all to appeal to anyone who hasn’t seen every episode of the series: I’d go so far to say it’s almost completely impenetrable without having sat through all of Twin Peaks.

The film explores two plot-lines: the first an investigation by FBI Agent Chester Diamond (Chris Isaak) into the murder of Teresa Banks, a plotline referred to many times in the series. The film then flashes forward a year to cover the final few days of the original murder victim Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and her relationship with her father Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), who is possessed by a demonic presence known as BOB, driven by it to perform acts of sexual and physical violence. Laura is aware – and terrified – of the existence of BOB (a greasy haired face from a thousand nightmares) but seems unable to recognise that BOB and her father are one and the same. It’s the discovery of this in the film that will help to tip her over the edge into despair.

If the film is about anything other than expanding the mythology around BOB and the mysterious “Black Lodge” between dimensions, where evil and violence abound, it’s about the damaging impact of domestic abuse. The film intensely explores the personality damage Laura (an excellent and fully committed Sheryl Lee, leaving nothing in the locker room in a performance of fearless intensity) has suffered as a result of years of sexual abuse from her father (Ray Wise equally good as his personality veers wildly between gentle father and possessed evil rapist). Laura’s fractured psyche is the root cause, Lynch makes clear, of her sexual promiscuity, drug addiction and flashes of cruelty. She’s even aware of the damage, as seen in her desperation to protect others (especially the gentle Donna) from being sucked into the nightmare of her life.

The unremitting bleakness of Laura’s disastrous life is intermixed with the horror of the scenes where we witness Leland’s destructive behaviour to her, while the final scene of her eventual murder is haunting in its skilful nightmare imagery and suggestive editing. Lynch’s direction remains humane and tender, and despite putting Sheryl Lee through the ringer she never feels exploited. Instead, the film has an incredible empathy for both her suffering, and the confused, damaged actions she is driven to carry out. It gives us an understanding of the damage that can be done to even the strongest seeming people by abuse.

Alongside this, Lynch unleashes the full range of dark surrealism through a series of disturbing images to build up his mystical backstory. This is a flat out horror film, with twisted images of monkeys, blood and forests guaranteed to haunt your dreams. Nearly every scene in Twin Peaks re-positions the often quirky town of many of the episodes as a nightmareish world of neon, darkened rooms and twisted sexual and physical violence. The portrayal of Laura Palmer’s fragile heart is as intensely moving as it is intensely filmed, while the views behind the red curtain into the hellish underbelly of Twin Peaks’ mystical mythology will stick with you for some time – and is sure to be central to the new third series.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was met with intense hostility when it was released: “It’s not the worst movie ever made,” the New York Times review read, “it just seems to be”. David Lynch publically stated he had clearly done when the network couldn’t do, and successfully killed Twin Peaks. Of course that wasn’t the case – with the new third series finally coming to the screen 25 years after the screening of this film. The re-evaluation of the film has only grown in the intervening period. The nightmarish content (and the final scenes of the series) – the wicked BOB, the nightmare of the Black Lodge and the Red Room, the elements of psychological horror – these are the things that Twin Peaks is remembered as being about: the rotten core of the sweet pie of the town.

Child 44 (2014)


Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman investigate murder in Stalinist Russia: It should be more interesting than it is

Director: Daniel Espinosa

Cast: Tom Hardy (Leo Demidov), Noomi Rapace (Raisa Demidova), Joel Kinnaman (Vasili Nikitin), Gary Oldman (General Nesterov), Vincent Cassel (Major Kuzmin), Jason Clarke (Anatoly Brodsky), Paddy Considine (Vladimir Malevich), Fares Fares (Alexei Andreyev), Charles Dance (Major Grachev), Tara Fitzgerald (Inessa Nesterova)

Adaptations of bestselling books are tricky things. Your source material already has a pre-existing fan base but you also need to bring new faces into the multiplex. Is that easy to do? Not always – and many films fail to strike a balance between telling the story for newcomers and satisfying the old fans. This is one of those failures.

Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy) is a war hero and NKVD officer in 1950s Stalinist Russia. Initially complacent and sure that he is a good man doing his best in the system, his life is shattered after his wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) – a woman who secretly hates her husband – is maliciously reported as a traitor, and Leo refuses denounce her. Banished to the outbacks of Russia, Leo feels compelled to find some redemption by investigating a child murderer. But Stalin has ruled murder is a capitalist crime “impossible” in the paradise of Communist Russia, making it a crime the all-powerful state has decreed cannot exist.

It’s hard to put your finger exactly on why this film never comes to life. It ticks nearly all the boxes of the original book’s plot (it in fact changes the one part of the book I found a “shark jump”, the identify of the killer itself). It’s well shot. There are some very good actors in it. It’s a good story. But it just doesn’t work – you never really invest in it. Perhaps the problem is the film has to jettison the interior monologues of the characters, so we lose much of the context of the action.

The book’s strength was its exploration of the nature of investigating crime in Stalin’s Russia: where crimes only exist if the state agrees they can, where investigation is largely unnecessary as the perpetrator is always proclaimed at the start, where those investigating the crimes are constantly in fear of being denounced for failures (“if the man I follow escapes, I will be accused of working with him”). The film fails to get this Stalinist tension across, so is left with just the bare workings of the plot without the novel’s context, making it seem like a “murder of the week” TV movie.

The attempt to get all the plot ticked means many actors get wasted in heavily reduced parts. A particular victim is Gary Oldman, who can’t be on screen for more than 15 minutes, and switches from obstructive boss to confidante as the plot requires. For the leads, Hardy and Rapace give quality performances (Rapace in particular is very good), and I did like the way the film really explored how Raisa’s feelings for Leo change from disgust and fear towards true affection. But you never really feel or care for them as you should.

However, they, along with the rest of the cast, suffer from the decision to give all the actors thick Roosian acksents. Why was this decided? Not only does this make some lines hard to hear (particularly Hardy’s) and stifles variance in delivery, but there is no need for it. Every character is Russian. They are all talking Russian. It’s all set in Russia. Why not have them use non-strongly accented versions of their own voices? Do we really need thick Slavic vowels to remind us we are in Russia?

Child 44 is a disappointing film, and perhaps the worst thing about it is, if you watch it before reading the book, you’ll probably wonder what all the fuss was about. By largely failing to get across the full complexity, danger and madness of the Stalinist system, it reduces the book’s plot into something flimsy and everyday. The whole adaptation has almost completely missed the point of what made the book so different and compelling in the first place. By doing so it turns the story into something that feels much more derivative than it actually was.