13 FOR HALLOWEEN #3: The Quiet Ones

Now and then you pick up a DVD for a song and, not knowing the first thing about the movie, sit down and watch it and you think to yourself Hey, for a couple of quid that wasn’t bad, while knowing in your heart of hearts that if you’d paid full whack for it as a new release your thoughts might be a little different.

On cover of the DVD of ‘The Quiet Ones’ that I picked up for a song without knowing the first thing about the movie, it cites Jared Harris and Sam Claflin as the names-above-the-title. I sat down and watched it and thought to myself Hey, for a couple of quid that wasn’t bad, while knowing in my heart of hearts that if I’d paid full whack for it as a new release my thoughts might have been a little different.

It also occurred to me that, as well respected as Harris is (though his work here is nowhere near his best) and as much as Claflin had just come off a triumvirate of high budget Hollywood fare – ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: The Dead Horse Drowns in Stranger Tides’, ‘Snow White and the Hot Fella from Thor’ and ‘The Hunger Games: Catch it While YA Fiction’s Still Popular’ – it should have been Olivia Cooke with her name above the title and everyone else banished to the tiny writing on the back of the DVD cover.

I first saw Cooke in ‘Ouija’ and, man, did she elevate a by-the-numbers sheet of boilerplate into something watchable. Then I saw her in ‘The Limehouse Golem’ and while the film was indubitably flawed, her performance was hypnotic. Ditto ‘Thoroughbreds’: considerably less than the sum of its parts, but Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy’s double-act was deliciously dark and entertaining. The lady’s currently redefining Becky Sharp for a new generation in the BBC adaptation of ‘Vanity Fair’.

So, yeah, there’s a lot of Olivia Cooke love going on at The Agitation of the Mind. And ‘The Quiet Ones’ is where her British-cinema’s-hottest-new-talent journey began. And the fact that I’m now five paragraphs into this review and all I’ve really said is that Olivia Cooke is all kinds of wonderful sort of returns us to that opening sentence caveat that ‘The Quiet Ones’, picked up on DVD for a song, leaves one thinking Hey, for a couple of quid that wasn’t bad, while knowing in one’s heart of hearts that if one had paid full whack for it as a new release one’s thoughts might be a little different.

The sixth film produced by Hammer since the studio’s relaunch in 2007 (though owned by various consortia, it had been dormant as a production company since the mid-80s), ‘The Quiet Ones’ is set in 1974 and for the most part – kudos to cinematographer Mátyás Erdély – looks like it was made that year. Ironically, 1974 was a year in which Hammer, more than ever before, was struggling to retain its market share in amongst experimental counter-culture fare, blaxploitation classics and American and Italian exploitationers that were grittier and gorier than Hammer’s stable of writers and directors would ever have striven for. It was the year of ‘Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell’ and ‘The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires’.

The aesthetic of ‘The Quiet Ones’ is about as far as you could imagine from these lurid but curiously cosy entries in the canon. I’d like to be able to make a case for comparing it to ‘The Quatermass Experiment’ (it does feature an experiment) or ‘Straight on Till Morning’ (much of the action is confined to a single house), but I’d probably be pushing it a bit.

And again, I’m writing about anything but the film I’m supposed to be reviewing!

Okay. Deep breath. ‘The Quiet Ones’ is about a university professor Joseph Coupland (Harris) and his research assistants – the romantically involved Harry Abrams (Rory Fleck Byrne) and Kristina Dalton (Erin Richards) – who are joined by film student and cameraman for hire Brian McNeil (Claflin) as they seek to find a scientific rationale for the disturbed and possibly supernatural behaviours exhibited by Jane Harper (Cooke). Coupland is a suave academic, self-assured to the point of arrogance, and Harry and Kristina are in thrall to him … Kristina to the point of going behind Harry’s back with him. Brian is the outsider: a sceptic, unimpressed by Coupland and increasingly sympathetic to Jane, whom he sees less as a potential danger to herself and others than Coupland’s meal-ticket to grants and academic acclaim.

Divisions and distrust and hardwired into the group dynamic from the outside; factor in the pressure cooker of the single location (a mouldering old house the group move to after the university essentially distance themselves from Coupland), McNeil’s resentment as Coupland’s experiments on Jane become more extreme, and the weird events that start happening as Jane (or the thing within her) responds angrily towards Coupland’s provocations.

For much of the 93-minute running time, writer/director John Pogue keeps ‘The Quiet Ones’ on a slow boil. Then things reach the tipping point, McNeil quits being a passive protagonist (asking questions on the audience’s behalf and reacting with either confusion or moral outrage but without actually challenging or steering the narrative) and starts doing some digging into both Coupland and Jane’s backgrounds. Revelations and recontextualisations pile up, with only minutes left. At which point the film goes off the rails. Not disastrously, not irretrievably, but the tone changes and characters start behaving according to the dictates of a script that suddenly wants to wrap everything up immediately if not sooner. Careful characterisation and slow burn tension is junked in favour of melodrama. A potentially terrifying denouement is glossed over in favour of an obvious twist.

Shame, really. Another pass at the script and a couple of days reshoots on a less hamfisted ending and it could have been quite the Hammer revival.

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.