The Limehouse Golem

‘The Limehouse Golem’ is a darkly entertaining little film that takes a perverse delight in monkeying with genre tropes and audience expectations. It starts out as a cop-and-killer/cat-and-mouse thriller, with jaded Scotland Yard detective John Kildare (Bill Nighy) – considered reputationally expendable by his superiors due to whispers about his sexuality – saddled with the sensationalist case of the title, a series of bloody murders that hark back to the Ratcliff Highway killings immortalised in Thomas de Quincey’s essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. Throw in the Victorian London setting and we’re firmly in proto-Jack-the-Ripper territory.

Then director Juan Carlos Medina and writer Jane Goldman (adapting Peter Ackroyd’s novel) pull the rug as one of Kildare’s four suspects – failed playwright John Cree (Sam Reid) – is killed, ostensibly at the hands of his ill-treated wife, former musical hall star “Little” Lizzie (Olivia Cooke). The cases overlap. Lizzie’s trail becomes as sensational as the Golem murders. The prosecution case stacks up against her. It’s not long before she’s facing the gallows. Suddenly the film has become a courtroom drama with Kildare’s investigation ticking away in the background.

Then there’s another structural and (to a slightly lesser degree) tonal shift as Kildare, convinced that unveiling Cree posthumously as the Golem will both save Lizzie and benefit his career, visits Lizzie in prison and cajoles her into recounting her relationship with John, eager for any snippet of information that might help. We’re now in flashback territory and along for the ride in what could easily have been a trite rags-to-riches story except that Lizzie’s rise to fame is played out against a backdrop of greasepaint, illusion and backstage rivalry, the musical hall a cauldron of simmering tensions and blurred sexual identities. Lizzie’s erstwhile protector and mentor Dan Leno (Douglas Booth) is a female impersonator; Lizzie makes her music hall debut dressed as a boy. There’s a late-in-the-game bit of troilism where Lizzie’s arch-rival Aveline (Maria Valverde) assumes Lizzie’s “wifely duties” (to muddy the waters further, it’s heavily hinted that Aveline is bisexual). Even the troupe’s impresario (Eddie Marsan) – a man so avuncular that everyone calls him Uncle, for God’s sake! – has certain peccadilloes.

So we’re in sleazy potboiler territory. Only we’re not. I mentioned the de Quincey connection earlier, and ‘The Limehouse Golem’ has one eye at all times on the literary. Of course it does. The source material is by Peter Ackroyd, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature who has a Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards on his mantelpiece*. Which is why a fog-wreathed murder mystery with all the genre tickboxes well and truly checked – from the haunted copper at the end of his career to the third act race to the gallows – has walk on parts for Karl Marx (Henry Goodman), George Gissing (Morgan Watkins). Dan Leno was also an historical figure. There’s no small amount of delight to be had in seeing the grumpily pragmatic Kildare going up against them – one of the film’s niftiest conceits is playing each of the murders as if one or other of them is guilty of it, depending on whom Kildare is interviewing at the time.

But for all of its literary pretentions, ‘The Limehouse Golem’ is at its best as a treatise on theatricality. The swapping of identities, one individual playing many parts; the nature of hagiography, brutal violence restaged for crowd-pleasing thrills; the interchangeability of gender. But it also says much about the misplaced ethos of masculinity, specifically with regard to how three men in particular want to save or redeem Lizzie and various others just plain use her.

It’s fair to say that ‘The Limehouse Golem’ has a hell of a lot bubbling away during its brisk hour and three quarter running time. It could easily have been a mess – artless and disjointed – even in the hands of an experienced director. Which makes it something worth praising that it is only his second feature-length outing, following 2012’s ‘Painless’ – a film I now have every intention of seeking out. Medina is savvy enough to give the audience what they want – there’s plenty of blood and gore, the streets of London are depicted as appropriately dark and dangerous and seedy, brothels and opium dens abound, and everything is foggy or shadowy – and keep the procedural element of the film happily bouncing from clue to clue, doubling down on the genre beats even as he subverts them.

He’s also adept with actors. Granted, Nighy – who took the role after Alan Rickman stepped down owing to ill-health (he passed away soon after) – doesn’t need much prompting: the role of Kildare fits him like a glove. Mays, a perennially underrated actor, does sterling work and who’d have thought that a Bill Nighy/Daniel Mays double act would form the backbone of the film? Booth, Marsan and Valverde are pitch perfect, the latter taking a role that was basically written as Bitch Queen From Hell and emerging with a nuanced character. And then there’s Cooke, who graduates from a cluster of good performances in indie films and TV dramas in impressive style. ‘The Limehouse Golem’, through all of its shifts in structure and perspective, is finally Lizzie’s story and Olivia Cooke gives us a Lizzie who is unforgettable.



*I’m speaking figuratively here. I don’t know whether he keeps them on his mantelpiece or not. It’s not like I’ve ever been round his gaff.

The World's End

Early on in ‘The World’s End’, the fictitious town of Newton Haven – the kind of depressingly generic English small town that’s not quaint or rural enough to be a village, nor close enough to the urban sprawl to consider itself a district of a city – is identified as being famous for having the first roundabout in Britain. (For the benefit of my non-UK based readers, that’s roundabout as in intersection, not the children’s ride.) It’s a curious thing about English towns that they clamour to boast about obscure or half-forgotten claims to fame, from the almost-interesting (West Auckland, County Durham: home of the first World Cup) to the blandly culinary (Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire: home of the pork pie) to the nobody-really-cares (Romford, Essex: home to the most lottery winners per capita in the UK).

Any English cinema-goer, on a single viewing, could probably name several dozen towns that Newton Haven reminds them of. And probably several hundred pubs evoked by the various watering-holes the five protagonists visit over the course of an increasingly bizarre, violent and hilariously fraught afternoon and evening. Because that’s another thing about being English: we love our pubs. For all that they’re becoming increasingly subsumed by chains (“Starbucking” is how Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s script puts it), or that the old-school spit ‘n’ sawdust working men’s pubs are as generic as the aforementioned chain establishments (a neat visual joke has the quintet blow the first joint as boring and roll up at the second declaring “this is more like it” only for a pull-back to reveal the interiors as identical), the English pub remains a nexus of social activity (good and bad), a retreat (a la the Winchester in ‘Shaun of the Dead’), and a place for youth to conduct an essential rite of passage whereby it pisses against the wall of manhood.

Two things you may have noticed about the above paragraphs: the use of “English”, not “British”; repeated references to masculinity. Because ‘The World’s End’ has two over-arching thematic concerns: what it means to be English; and how men interact/define themselves/fail to leave their youth or their past behind. In other words, take L.P. Hartley’s observation that “the past is a foreign country” and tip it on its head so that it’s the here and now that seems distinctly fucked up, add a couple of shots of Peckinpah’s rigorous and unflinching dissertations on masculinity, throw in some acerbic satire of the Monty Python variety, blend with ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and ‘They Live’, and serve with a government health warning.

‘The World’s End’ is perhaps the most ruthless and unflinching satirical statement on the nature of Englishness that I’ve ever seen in mainstream cinema, and not just for the reasons mentioned above. The film’s coda – which it would be remiss to discuss just days after the film opened – serves up a commentary on the insular, belligerent, inherently racist, island-race mindset that has characterised the land of my birth throughout its classist, bloody and empirical history. It’s the heaviest-hitting piece of film-making Wright or Pegg have put their name to and it all but kills the laughs (albeit many of them uneasy) of the film’s earlier stretches.

You’ll already know the plot from the trailers: sad bastard Gary (Pegg), forty-something and still acting like the twat he was at eighteen (only at eighteen his mates mistook twathood for cool), convinces said mates – corporate lawyer Andrew (Nick Frost), civil engineer Steven (Paddy Consodine), upmarket car salesman Peter (Eddie Marsan) and estate agent Oliver (Martin Freeman) – to return to Newton Haven with him and complete the epic pub crawl they attempted at eighteen but never finished due to being eighteen and getting shitfaced very quickly. Gary refers to it, ad nauseum, as the best night of his life, but as the film progresses it becomes evident that not completing it has come to define his life inasmuch as it’s a personal failure he’s been unable to move on from.

Two decades and attendance at AA meetings notwithstanding, Gary is exactly the same person he was in his late teens. He dresses the same, talks the same, drives the same car. Everyone else has grown, matured(ish), changed. The first third or so of ‘The World’s End’ mines this dynamic for its humour. Pegg is unafraid to play Gary as essentially unlikeable. Few of his pals, for all that adulthood and responsibility have scrawled their signature, are that likeable either. Perhaps only Andrew and Steven emerge with any real decency. Regarding the latter, Nick Frost turns in the finest acting performance of his career, a nuanced and complex characterisation that allows Andrew to vacillate between poignantly sympathetic and fuckin’ badass when he cuts loose with two barstools and some bone-crunching WWF moves in one of the many hysterically staged and edited fight scenes.

And you’ll already know that things take an abrupt swerve into sci-fi territory. As the pub crawl – nicknamed the Golden Mile and encompassing twelve pubs (The First Post, The Old Familiar, The Famous Cock, The Cross Hands, The Good Companions, The Trusty Servant, The Mermaid, The Beehive, The King’s Head, The Hole in the Wall and The World’s End: there’s a play on each of the names and they all work on different levels, from the poundingly obvious to the sneakily subtle) – progresses, Gary and co. find themselves under threat from an otherworldly collective called The Network, and being too under the influence to drive and thereby make their escape, they’re forced to see the Golden Mile through to the bitter (or lager) end. En route, Gary and Andrew’s fractious friendship is further tested, and Gary and Steven’s teenage rivalry for the affections of Oliver’s sister Sam (Rosamund Pike) is revisited.

Wright and Frost begun their loosely connected “Cornetto trilogy” with the horror comedy ‘Shaun of the Dead’, which grew out of the twenty-something characters and situations of their London-based sitcom ‘Spaced’; ‘Hot Fuzz’ moved the focus to small town life and embraced the buddy movie/action thriller as its genre touchstone. ‘The World’s End’ takes the stoner/loser/smartarse protagonist of ‘Spaced’ and ‘Shaun of the Dead’, strips him of his loveability, transplants him slap into the heart of – and completely at odds with – the provincial outsider-unfriendly mindset of small town life pace ‘Hot Fuzz’, and ups the ante to cosmological stakes. How high? Imagine Iain M. Banks’s the Culture (and I rather think Wright and Frost had this in mind: there’s a very specific nod to Banks’s work in ‘Hot Fuzz’) squaring off against ‘Withnail and I’.

‘The World’s End’ will probably prove divisive. It kicks out ideas at such a rate of knots that audiences may come away bamboozled (I’ll openly admit that I was hesitant writing this review on just one viewing), and its final sequence goes into some pretty cynical (if still funny) territory. Its achievement, though, is an almost perfect synthesis of its predecessors while existing (and belligerently raising two fists to the universe) on its own terms.