Doctor Jekyll (2023)

Okay, I am going to start this review with a note. I will always strive to refer to people by their preferred names and pronouns. It's not being "woke", contrary to vocal idiots who keep crying about it. It's offering the basic level of politeness that we automatically tend to offer to anyone while not obsessing about what toilet facilities they want to use. With that in mind, Eddie Izzard is credited here as Eddie Izzard, and I'll be referring to them as such here.

A reworking of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson tale, Doctor Jekyll played well to horror film festival audiences last year, with many singling out the performance from Izzard as being well worth your time. I was eager for this to hit the VOD market, and made time for it this week when I was able to purchase a digital copy of it. I'm happy to have given it my support, but I am a bit surprised by those who heaped so much praise on it, suspecting this may be another case of the festival bump that can often occur when watching a new film with a like-minded group of genre fans (something I am sure I have been guilty of myself). Or maybe it was also helped by the love for the Hammer Studios name, who are behind the distribution of it here in the UK.

Scott Chambers plays Rob, a young man trying to get his life back together after serving some time in prison. He ends up being given a job caring for the enigmatic Doctor Nina Jekyll (Izzard). Doctor Jekyll seems to like Rob, keen to give him a chance even while her assistant, Sandra (Lindsay Duncan), just seems to want rid of him. As we all know, but our lead character here crucially doesn't, you tend to have a Hyde wherever you have a Jekyll. This particular Hyde (Rachel Hyde) has a plan, and Rob is an unwittingly vital part of it.

Written by Dan Kelly-Mulhern, his first and only credit so far, this is a decent reworking of the text that feels majorly boosted by the canny use of Izzard in the titular role. The thematic strands being explored, and tied together into a strong narrative rope, feel both timely and well worth including to modernise and rework the timeless tale of terror. Director Joe Stephenson isn't a complete newcomer, having previously worked on a number of TV shows and a previous film, Chicken, where he also worked with both Chambers and Morgan Watkins (who plays Rob's brother, Ewan), and he handles things here very well, keeping the focus on the performances without making it all feel hampered by the fairly limited locations and small cast.

I cannot overstate how great Izzard is in the lead role here, a casting coup so inspired that it makes it impossible to imagine the film without their presence. They weave between light and darkness in ways that anyone familiar with the tale should expect, and their eloquence and verbosity perfectly matches the way that the bifurcated character is written. It's a shame that Chambers, so good in the aforementioned Chicken, cannot come close to matching Izzard. His character seems a bit too resigned to failure in the first half of the movie, but then becomes far too easygoing and unguarded in time for the third act to play out. Watkins is fine in his role, Duncan is enjoyable for her limited amount of screentime, and Robyn Cara plays a figure from Rob's past who may end up jeopardising the job that he needs to keep hold of. Oh, there's also a cameo from Simon Callow, who is used well for his fleeting appearance.

This is very good stuff, although it's never as intriguing or transgressive as it could have been. It's messy, especially when it falls apart during the final scenes, but it's full of elements to admire, from the characterisations to the commentary on "big pharma", and recommended to those after something that nicely blends the familiar with a sprinkling of modern freshness.

7/10

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Netflix And Chill: Malevolent (2018)

Malevolent starts off well enough. Set in Scotland in the 1980s, it's the tale of a brother and sister (Jackson and Angela, played by Ben Lloyd-Hughes and Florence Pugh) who, along with a couple of friends, make themselves money by going in to locations that are apparently haunted and conducting a "clearance". It's quite an easy gig, and they have their patter down to a fine art, but it's not long into the movie when things start to become a lot less fake than usual. Things start to get odd for Angela during what should be a regular, easy, gig. Then things go from bad to worse when they are hired by a woman (Celia Imrie) who claims to be plagued by the spirits of noisy children in her home.

It's not that the acting here is bad, not really. Imrie may be the veteran, and she's good fun in her role, but the performances from Lloyd-Hughes and Pugh are decent enough, as is the supporting turn from Scott Chambers (playing the other main member of the group; Georgina Bevan is also onscreen but given so little to do that she barely makes an impression). James Cosmo is as good as ever in his small role, Niall Greig Fulton does okay, and that covers the main characters.

The script isn't really that bad either. Written by Ben Ketai and Eva Konstantopoulos (based on the novel "Hush" by the latter), it mixes in enough melodrama and decent ideas to create a heady brew. You have a dead parent who was apparently insane, claiming to be contacted by spirits. You have the dynamic of the brother and sister relationship, with the male pushing his female sibling into situations that she starts to find increasingly uncomfortable. And you have the character played by Imrie, eccentric and mysterious, perhaps innocent but perhaps not-so-innocent. There are even one or two decent scares in the first half of the film. Then the second half starts up, moving everything along to a third act that is horribly muddled and misjudged, sacrificing any creepy atmosphere for violence and any subtlety for crude simplicity. It becomes embarrassing long before the whole debacle draws to a depressingly dull conclusion.

Director Olaf de Fleur Johannesson (credited as just Olaf De Fleur) doesn't help. His background, a filmography that includes a number of documentary features and standard fictions, seems to have left him ill-prepared for this kind of material. This may explain why he does better in the earlier scenes that feature the strangeness developing in the background of the central relationship dynamics. And if it was his decision to accompany some spooky visuals in the second half of the movie with horribly unnecessary "spooky" voices then he really helped to undermine what could have been a decent little ghost story before that sharp turn to the violence.

I started off this review trying to be kind, as usual, but the more time I spent writing about it, the angrier I got. It's just so bloody annoying. Especially after a solid, if unspectacular, opening act. So much is left unexplored (background of the characters, emotional baggage, even the fact that it is set in the 1980s . . . something I assumed would figure into the plot but it never does) that the viewing experience just becomes more and more frustrating.

Some will be able to watch this and not become as irked as I was. Good for them. I suggest most people skip this and instead pick one of the MANY better horror titles available.

3/10

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