Reviewed by Mike Martin
Stars Tom Conti, Daryl Hannah, Miriam Margolyes, Simon MacCorkindale, Elaine Paige, Matt Kaufman, William Ellis,
Craig Painting, Ty Glaser
Written by Gilbert Adair
Certification UK 15
Runtime 89 minutes
Directed by Raoul Ruiz
The Oscar season is over and the silly season has begun with this laughable psychological thriller that belongs on the Sci-Fi channel – at about 11.30 at night. The two leads in what is basically a double-hander are not to blame, although Conti’s blundering old duffer does irritate – it’s the simply dozy, daft script from Adair – and as he’s adapting his own book he only has himself to blame.
Conti is Sir Paul, an ageing art critic now living in a massive gothic house (ooh, scary – if you’re five years old) with just a housekeeper for company. He was blinded in a car accident, and now wishes to write his memoirs, so he hires Jane Ryder (Hannah) to not only type it out for him but to describe things to him to jog his memory. As soon as she moves in she starts pulling the eyes off teddy bears, and the ‘mystery’ begins. At first her lies seem insignificant, telling him she is wearing a red dress while in a black top, and buying a Rembrandt jigsaw which is actually Holbein’s The Ambassador’s. Then they get stranger – Jane reads Sir Paul the newspaper headlines which consist of Madonna’s death and Donald Trump turning Muslim.
Clearly she has an agenda, but boy is it a long slog before we get to the ‘twist’, which is basically so predictable and stupid it’s difficult not to laugh. Throw in lots of shots of gargoyles, autumnal leaves and a soundtrack that Hammer would have rejected for being too cheesy and it adds up to a real collector’s item of banality. Adair is clearly trying to recreate the mood of Sleuth, but that was pretty hammy by the time it limped from the stage to the screen in 1972, News for Adair – it’s now 2010 old son, and times, and films, have moved on. The reveal at the end is not only out of character with the rest of the film, it uses a theme that is way more serious than the set-up deserves.
Conti does his best in a part that basically consists of bumping into things, and Hannah tries her best, sweeping around the old house in her Vivienne Westwood collection and, in one scene, nothing at all, for no particular reason. A complete waste of talent all round.