In Bruges (UK, 2008)
Directed by Martin McDonagh
Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Clemence Poesy

There have been a number of British gangster films in the last ten years which have re-approached well-worn crime thriller stories through distinctive dialogue, full-on violence and black humour. At its height this wave produced Gangster No. 1 and Sexy Beast, featuring barnstorming central performances by Malcolm McDowell and Ben Kingsley as near-mythical incarnations of evil. And while In Bruges never quite matches up to either of these, there is plenty in the way of humour and invention to render it thoroughly enjoyable.In Bruges is the debut film of playwright Martin McDonagh, most famous for his Leenane trilogy of plays - The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West. All three plays revolve around brutal acts of murder in which the death in question has left deep emotional scars on the perpetrators: in the case of The Lonesome West, it has caused the two brothers to divide the house precisely in two, with each brother owning what is on one side of a line.What connects all McDonagh's work is a rich streak of black, absurdist humour, which walks the same tightrope as Samuel Beckett or in some cases Spike Milligan between the utterly ridiculous and the drolly melancholic. The extremities of the characters in In Bruges are not simply a ploy on McDonagh's part to make a stock plot seem distinctive. They are there to deepen the archetypes and bring out more deeper, existential elements in the story and the characters, using banality to introduce depth.In Bruges begins with the same old story of a hitman (or hitmen in this case) hiding out in a foreign town after completing a job. Both men are faced with the prospect of being there for an undetermined amount of time, with nothing to do except spend their money and wait for instructions. Ken (Brendan Gleeson), the elder of the two, wants to take in the sights and wait patiently to move on, while Ray (an on-form Colin Farrell) is content to confine his sight-seeing to the bottoms of beer glasses.As with The American, Anton Corbijn's recent genre exercise, the characters in In Bruges carry guilt from a past mistake - in this case the death of a child during the assassination of a Catholic priest. Whole sections of the film tip their hat knowingly to Don't Look Now - so knowingly that Clemence Poesy feels the need to mention it on the set of the film-within-a-film. Just as Donald Sutherland keeps seeing images of a girl in red around Venice, and becomes convinced that he is seeing his daughter, so Ray's encounters with the dwarf actor are made all the more awkward by his memories of what went wrong.There are also strong connections with Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara's striking depiction of Catholic guilt and redemption. Like Harvey Keitel's character, Ken and Ray are struggling with the ins and outs of judgement and redemption, struggling to come to terms with their purpose and meaning as they stare increasingly into the abyss. There are conversations about purgatory, and the film-within-a-film refers to Hieronymus Bosch, a 15th-century painter famous for his depictions of hell.Within this context, Bruges becomes the purgatory into which our characters have landed and whose attitude reflects their ultimate ability or willingness to escape. Ray feels immense guilt for what happened to the child, but this guilt is matched by a desire to atone and escape. His final words, as he is loaded into the ambulance and passes out, see him leaving purgatory, content with death over remaining there even if death leads to damnation. Ken, on the other hand, is more resigned to his fate and is less willing to put up a fight when Harry's angel of death arrives. Having killed many more men than Ray, he knows that he will never see heaven. Although he attempts to help Ray both in life and death, he ultimately allows death to find him and puts up very little resistance.

But by far and away, the biggest debt of In Bruges is to Harold Pinter, specifically The Dumb Waiter from which most of the premise is taken. It shares the central idea of two hitmen who spend most of their time talking and arguing about things which seem utterly irrelevant but are in fact nothing of the sort. And the final twist is the same, although this is revealed a lot earlier than in Pinter's script. The only massive departure, in terms of character at least, comes in the role of Harry, played with typical venom by Ralph Fiennes. Dumb is the last word you would use to describe his character, whose every word feels like an acidic curse even when he isn't swearing his mouth off.Because the genre ingredients are so familiar and knowingly played, there are two traps into which In Bruges could easily fall. The first is descending into total caricature, along the lines of Guy Ritchie's early efforts: the language and gestures become so ridiculous that all sense of believability is lost. Although Harry is particularly outrageous in his behaviour, the film stays just the right side of caricature, playing up the absurd elements while using the language and violence to keep us feeling threatened even as we laugh ourselves silly. A typical example of this would be Fiennes' first appearance, when he smashes his office phone to pieces in frustration. It's very funny to see a grown man concentrate his rage on something so small so repeatedly, but even as we laugh we realise that he is capable of doing the same thing to something more fleshy, with horrible consequences.The second, more common trap is that the ordinary nature of the story acts as a lead weight on the character development: in other words, the story is too thin or straightforward either to allow extended character development, or to give any reason for such a thing to occur. While In Bruges doesn't completely fall into this trap, its story is disappointingly simple once all the language, violence and pondering has been stripped away.

Because of its clear resemblance to Pinter's work, one could argue that this criticism should not be levelled against McDonagh but Pinter himself. Pinter was part of a theatrical tradition started by Beckett in which characters existed and acted regardless of or in absence of any story - Beckett's later plays often occur well after the action has taken place, and said action is only referred to in passing. But this paucity of actual plot has not prevented some of Pinter's other works from translating successfully to the screen, most notably The Birthday Party and Betrayal.In Bruges is caught between a rock and a hard place in its relationship to genre. On the one hand, the touchstones to previous crime thrillers are so clear that it struggles to escape from convention when it really needs to: we know more or less where it is going even before Harry arrives, and so its scope for exploring things on a profoundly existential level is limited. On the other hand, when it does manage to elevate itself above convention, there is not enough narrative drive in the characters to prevent their conversations from going around in circles. As The Bed-Sitting Room proved, it is difficult to put work in Beckett's vein on screen without it feeling lacking in narrative, something which is perhaps less of a problem on stage.While this aspect of In Bruges remains frustrating, the film is still thoroughly entertaining thanks to the quality of its cast. Fiennes is the highlight, with Harry being clearly modelled on the work of Louis Mellis and David Scinto: in his relentlessness and constant anger, he could pass for a cousin of Don Logan. That said, his performance wouldn't work without someone more understated to counterpoint him, and Farrell achieves that masterfully. Having drifted in his career between total fluff (Alexander) and pretentious waffle (The New World), he gets the balance spot on to deliver a performance of vulnerability and sympathy. Gleeson anchors things in another fine performance, and Clemence Poesy is every bit as sweet and charming here as she was in Philip Ridley's Heartless.In Bruges is an interesting, entertaining and often hilarious take on a well-worn story and subject area. It is ultimately a little too generic for its own good, with McDonagh wrestling with the self-imposed confinements of genre in an effort to combine existentialism and narrative. The result is a partial success which makes for great late-night viewing, and while not up there with Gangster No. 1 or Sexy Beast, it comes through with most of the goods and hints at better things to come for its director.

Rating:
Verdict: Overly generic but highly entertaining

The Lady Vanishes (UK, 1938)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Starring Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, Dame May Whitty

By the time he made The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock had been directing for seventeen years. He had built himself a reputation as a consummate craftsman and made his fair share of mistakes along the way (the bomb scene in Sabotage being one of his biggest regrets). Coming just before his move to Hollywood and the Oscar success with Rebecca, The Lady Vanishes is a taut, streamlined and emotional thriller with all the classic ingredients out in full force.The Lady Vanishes is a very loose adaptation of The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White - so loose, in fact, that almost everything in the film is different. The setting and some of the character names are unchanged, but the rest has been markedly altered - judging by this, for the better. Such decisions tie in with Hitchcock's underlying interest in technique over content: his concern was never with what the story is about, as with how was the best way to tell it.The first plus point of the film is that it takes a relatively simple premise and not only runs with it, but explores it from every conceivable angle in the space of 90 minutes. Even when there's a big shoot-out in the last ten minutes, the film has the strength of its convictions and never feels like the director is giving up on the material. Whereas Flightplan wanted to be taken seriously and ended up hoisted by its own petard, The Lady Vanishes follows through with its premise until Hitchcock is satisfied that the audience's needs have been met.The film contains a number of aspects which foreshadow Hitchcock's better-known work. He would return to dreams and hallucinations a few years later in Spellbound, and both films are rooted in unreliable narrators searching for an identity which may or may not be their own. When Miss Froy is first introduced to Iris, the latter mishears it as Freud, further confirmation of Hitchcock's continued interest in sex, dreams and psychology.Like The 39 Steps before it and Notorious after it, The Lady Vanishes is a classic story of ordinary people caught up in the world of spying by a single chance encounter. And there is a tenuous link with The Birds in a scene halfway through, where Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave are beset upon by pigeons. But the film is also a refinement of existing techniques. The use of shadows in the strangling scene is a development of the gallows sequence in Murder!, while the use of kaleidoscopic vision to depict hallucinations is taken from Fritz Lang's Metropolis.The claustrophobic setting of The Lady Vanishes means that there is much less opportunity for the performers to descend into melodrama. While there is no doubt that their characters are whimsical, they feel genuine and understated, and there are only occasional moments in which our heroine has to be hysterical on cue.

At the beginning of the film we are introduced to a host of characters staying in an overcrowded hotel after their train is delayed by an avalanche. We focus on two irascible Englishmen who are frustrated by their failure to be understood and by the lack of appreciation for cricket (they are trying to get home to watch a test match). In one scene the older gentleman hangs up on someone else's phone call because the other party didn't know the score; in another, he makes jibes about Americans having no sense of perspective because the New York Times covers baseball but not cricket.This sense of whimsy is complimented by Hitchcock's use of language as a means of alienation. Many different languages are spoken on screen as a means of making our heroine more isolated. There are no subtitles, and only so many characters can interpret, which is one of the reasons why Iris and Gilbert become friends. This device is a huge influence on the level of trust we have for both our heroine and the other passengers: are people simply misunderstanding her, or do they have something to hide and are using language as a protective barrier?Hitchcock always made a clear distinction between mystery and suspense, with the former being wholly intellectual and the latter emotional. Superficially, The Lady Vanishes could be classed as a mystery, since its plot is based around a search for a missing person, just like a detective searching for the murderer. The story has vague similarities with Murder on the Orient Express: the action takes places on a train with many strangers from different countries, their various stories do not corroborate and in one solution everyone is in on it. But Hitchcock doesn't just settle for a sense of mystery, and as things move forward it is our emotional response which becomes key.The suspense he generates comes from a number of sources. Some of it is down to set-pieces, the most dramatic being Michael Redgrave having out of the train window in the manner of The 39 Steps. Some of it comes from the time restrictions involved - the train moves to various stations, and characters constantly mutter about crossing the border and needing to make connections. And some of it comes from physical constraints - short of jumping out the window, there's no way off a speeding train. But all of these examples work because of the emotional attachment we have to the characters, both in the reluctant romance and the development of Iris' character as she moves from pity and despair to being more determined and resourceful.
Like so many of Hitchcock's thrillers, The Lady Vanishes is brilliant at throwing us off the scent, with little touches here and there which appear more significant than eventually transpires. Through a series of cleverly timed edits, we come to believe that the two Englishmen we meet at the start are the ones we should be watching. After Iris and Gilbert pass along a corridor, we see them coming out of a hidden cubicle, as if they were trying to avoid her. Later we see them talking about the pressing need to get back home: these scenes are shot from a more intrusive angle, so that all their talk of 'cricket' could easily be nothing of the sort.Then we come to the twist. It's hardly the most impressive or shocking in cinema, but for a film anchored by an unreliable narrator it handles it very assuredly. Some thrillers, like Shutter Island or Heartless, eventually have to come down on one side or the other and say what was real or true in a often disappointing manner. With The Lady Vanishes, no such moment is necessary because only one version of events can be true. Because we see Miss Froy around other characters before she boards the train, she has to have genuinely disappeared. Had the entire film been set on the train, with no preamble, only then would the other option been remotely viable.

On top of all that, The Lady Vanishes is surprisingly funny. Although certain elements have dated, it takes a playful look at national stereotypes, saluting English resolve while sending up the stiff-upper-lip. Michael Redgrave gets all the juiciest lines in a caddish performance which serves as an interesting contrast to his work in The Browning Version or The Dambusters. And then there are the two Englishmen, whom after talking about cricket forever and explaining wickets with sugar cubes, finally get back to London to discover the match was rained off.The Lady Vanishes is a great thriller from a director on the cusp of greatness. It takes a simple, modest premise and rings out the maximum amount of both thrills and tension. The performances are believable, the plot is twisty and compelling, and Hitchcock's direction is assured and professional. Later works would be more experimental, but this remains a highlight of his pre-Hollywood career.

Rating: 4.5/5
Verdict: A first-class early-period Hitchcock

Heartless (UK, 2010)
Directed by Philip Ridley
Starring Jim Sturgess, Noel Clarke, Clemence Poesy, Joseph Mawle

With the exception of John Landis, Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick, there are few directors who can go more than ten years between films and still deliver the magic. But now Philip Ridley can be added to that illustrious list with Heartless, which comes fifteen years after his mesmerising fairy tale, The Passion of Darkly Noon.It doesn't take long to realise that Heartless is something very special. Its visuals are superb, capturing the East End of London as something both gritty and fantastical - think Michael Powell meets Kidulthood by way of Guillermo Del Toro. The familiar shots of council estates, graffiti and street lamps are married to eerie backstreets, dark alleyways and a blood-red sunrise, as if the natural and the supernatural were intertwined in a dance of death. But it's not just the streets that ripple with the unreal: Papa B's flat in a disused tower block resembles the Pale Man's dining room in Pan's Labyrinth.Heartless is a film in which fantasy and reality violently collide, in which demons and the forces of evil are not just coexisting with real life, but infiltrating and manipulating it. The film owes a great debt to the story of Faustus, with Joseph Mawle's sepulchral Papa B standing in for the Devil and a dead-pan, no-nonsense Eddy Marsden channelling Mephistopheles as Weapons Man.But although it shares the central premise and morals of Faustus - you can do anything you like, but be careful what you wish for - the film departs from the legend in the precise relationship between the Devil and his eventual prey. Jamie, played brilliantly by Jim Sturgess, does not inherit or possess any of the palpable magic that Faustus does when he signs over his soul. In fact, he gets much more of a rum deal, becoming as much a victim as everyone around him. Rather than being able to channel demonic power to live his life the way he wants, his life is at the mercy of chaos, and through his life the Devil's aim of greater horror and panic becomes reality.Heartless is suffused with Ridley's trademark blend of religious allegory and fairy tales, a combination that is every bit as seamless as the visual marriage of magic and grittiness. As a genre piece, the film is an interesting pairing of the streetwise dialogue of Kidulthood (a fair comparison considering the presence of Noel Clarke) with the more poetic sensibilities of Guillermo Del Toro or Clive Barker. It begins unevenly as all these unlikely elements struggle to weave together, but it doesn't take long for the effect to become hypnotic.

Because of its links to horror artists and directors, Heartless references a number of individual horror films; Ridley takes the various touches which crop up and re-forges them into something new. The character of She, a heavily tattooed gangster with a claw for one hand, hints back to the killer in Candyman: as in both Clive Barker's story and the film by Bernard Rose, the character is either the physical vessel of some supernatural evil or one of the keys to determine where the characters' sanity lies. There are also strong references to A Nightmare on Elm Street, particularly the Freddie Krueger slashes across AJ's chest and the scenes of Jamie being hurled violently against the ceiling by an unseen evil.But by far the closest companion to Heartless is Ridley's previous film, The Passion of Darkly Noon. Both revolve around central characters with a deeply warped view of the world: Darkly Noon is a young man indoctrinated into a fundamentalist Christian cult, and Jamie is implied to have a history of mental illness. Christian imagery is prominent in both films: Jamie's house is full of icons belonging to his late mother, and in Papa B's flat the lampshades on the walls cast shadows resembling the shape of a cross.

Both Heartless and The Passion of Darkly Noon begin on relatively realistic ground and then pull us headlong into a terrifying world which is equal parts fairy tale, horror and fantasy. In the case of Darkly Noon (featuring a career-best performance by Brendan Fraser), what starts off as a story about indoctrination and a blinkered worldview that stunts development turns into a Grimm's fairy tale about sex, witchcraft and a climactic clash of ideals which is worthy of The Wicker Man. We begin believing that one side is deluded, then the other side, until eventually we don't know who to trust and have to just lose ourselves in it.While Heartless never quite reaches the levels of transcendent, euphoric terror which Ridley achieved there, Jamie doesn't exactly make it easy for us. There are any number of terrifying, earth-shattering moments which will make even the seasoned horror fun curl into the foetal position and pray for it to end.

The most terrifying of these comes where Jamie has to stab a male prostitute and cut out his heart while he is still alive. Having chosen his victim and brought him back to his flat, Jamie reluctantly wraps him in cling-film in what his victim perceives to be an elaborate homosexual ritual. When Jim Sturgess pulls out the knife and we hear the hooker's muffled screams, we are thrust right into the horror that character is experiencing; we tense up and start to panic, desperate to escape and yet knowing we can't look away.Scenes like this are cleverly counterpointed by imagery which occurs earlier in the film. The precise demands placed upon Jamie regarding the nature of the murder are a symbol of his own status: he must cut out the heart of another, for he no longer has a heart himself. While he is more than capable of physical or erotic love, his desire for friendship and platonic love is ebbing away. The cling-filming is counterpointed by the beautiful moment of Jamie emerging from the cocoon of his own burnt flesh, with his heart-shaped birthmark nowhere to be seen.One of the key images in Heartless is that of fire and immolation. Ridley shoots flame like another character, with its own personality and powers. Just as there is a double meaning to hearts in the film, so fire is the means of both our hero's transformation and destruction. When Papa B hands him the Molotov cocktail and Jamie sets himself alight, the fire is cleansing him of his old self, like a furnace removing impurities from metal. But in the final scene, fire becomes the means to briefly reunite with his dead father - only in destruction does Jamie realise what he truly wanted and whom he truly loved.The one real flaw with Heartless is its big final twist, in which we are shown what was real and what was not. On the one hand, it works brilliantly, with all the different parties corresponding to figures in the real world, and it does deliver a sucker punch as we realise what Jamie has actually done. But there's still something unsatisfying about it in the same way that Shutter Island was unsatisfying. Because of the way the film is played, it has to come down on one side or the other, when as with Scorsese's work the more radical and haunting choice would have been to leave us hanging.
Despite this quibble, Heartless is a truly great film and a welcome return to the big screen for Philip Ridley. While it never quite lives up to The Passion of Darkly Noon, it is a really stunning piece of work with haunting visuals and brilliant performances. Jim Sturgess excels in the central role, amply supported by gripping turns from Noel Clarke and Joseph Mawle, whose scene together on the rooftop is really harrowing. One only hopes we don't have to wait another 15 years for Ridley to return to our screens.

Rating: 4.5/5
Verdict: Mesmerising, magical, macabre and memorable