Okay, okay, for real this time, we’re done with the trauma shit. We’re still dealing with the macabre, but things are going to be a lot lighter this time around with a silly little whodunit mystery. And man, the cast for this thing is incredible. Putting Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan together as the leads is already beautiful all on its own, but adding in Adrien Brody, rising star Harris Dickinson, David Oyelowo making up for the double helping of bad from last year, and Reece motherloving Shearsmith? I could watch these people paint fences and still be fine with paying for the privilege.
Thankfully, though, everyone here is actually putting their talents to use. For a film that exists to both reference and subvert murder mystery tropes, Rockwell’s murmuring and sloshed Inspector is a good start. Brody and Oyelowo as the feuding director and screenwriter respectively work out really damn well, with Oyelowo in particular getting a lot of smirks with just how bitchy he gets. Shearsmith and Dickinson as John Woolf and Richard Attenborough (yes, the real-life actor) respectively are nice and chummy, rolling with the goofiness in a way that adds to the larger ideas about life imitating art.
But without question, it’s Ronan who steals the entire show. At once a major film fan and a parody of filmgoers who are quick to say “Ooh, ooh, that’s the killer, right?” at anyone who shows up on-screen, her bubbly personality and raw insecurity make for another proper highlight in her filmography. Give this character a series, for the love of Dude!
The film around these people looks really damn good as well. Cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay goes for a directly theatrical approach to framing, giving everything a Wes Andersonian sense of symmetry, and this is easily some of the cleanest camera work I’ve seen all year. Not self-imposed sketchiness to emphasis ‘realism’, but well-composed and crisp visuals. Bonus points for the liberal use of split-screen throughout, which gives the film’s overall aesthetic a nice fingerprint. It adds a lot to the story which is itself concerned with the making of a film based on a stageplay.
As for the humour on display, this ventures closer to chuckles than outright bursts of laughter. A lot of it banks on meta-comedy, like with Brody and Oyelowo ‘inadvertently’ predicting how the film they’re in ends up looking, along with many knowing nudges towards the tropes of Agatha Christie, who also turns up here as portrayed by one of my favourite actresses in Shirley Henderson. Some of it is kinda clever, like the references to nursery rhymes, but it mainly sticks to being pleasant. Nothing all that amazing, just… pleasant.
Well, save for the finale, which… don’t worry, I’m going to spoil who is behind it and why, but the ideas brought up by that revelation open up some interesting notions. At its core, this film is based on the idea of ‘real life’ turning into something out of a Christie story, complete with parlour reveal of who the killer is. But in that reveal, it ends up flipping the perspective: The idea of real life actually being in a Christie story.
Knowing how much real-world crime influences the fiction within that same genre, it raises some oddly poignant questions about all the fearmongering to do with people being influenced by fiction to do terrible things in the real world (*cough*Joker*cough)… but how, when tragedies in the real world are twisted and contorted into entertainment for the masses, it’s so commonplace that no-one really questions it. I specify ‘oddly’ because, for a film that plays everything so loose and light, it makes for a weird detour into heavier questions than the film is ultimately equipped to even be talking about, much less make any direct answers to.
Not that that becomes much of a problem for the film overall, though. It’s still a nice bit of light entertainment with some great casting and decent flair in the visual department. It’s just got a little chaser to bring out a touch of depth from its core concept, which for a viewer like myself that gravitates towards additions like that is certainly appreciated.
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