Bull (2021)

Warning: there really will be spoilers this time around!

A rather angry gentleman named Bull (Neil Maskell) kills his way through the underlings of gangster Norm (David Hayman) in a brutal and somewhat gratuitous manner, certainly not leaving their family business out of the business of dying. Before he kills he asks for the whereabouts of his son Aidan.

Flashbacks slowly reveal that ten years ago, Bull was working for Norm, but marrying your boss’s daughter can have dire repercussions when the marriage goes to shit. Custody battles can turn even uglier than those among civilised people and end even worse.

So much so that a trail of dead bodies years later can be their consequence.

I know very little about the surprising number of direct to streaming (and so on) action and gangster movies that are being churned out by various low budget filmmakers in the UK for at least a decade or so now. But I am well able to identify Paul Andrew Williams’s Bull as the kind of answer/climax movie that takes all of a genre’s tropes, joys and problems and turns them into something monolithic and forceful in what’s not so much a critique as the platonic ideal of its form.

So Williams’s film is nasty in its depiction of violence, often shockingly so, treating vengeance as the undignified and cruel business it is in a manner that goes from the grimly cruel to the disquieting by simply thinking the brutality through to its end. Bull – a guy with an action movie name if ever there was one – is not just the blunt object his name suggests but turns out to be something darker than just a man on a vengeance trip in a late turn towards the explicitly supernatural. And not in sweet baby Jesus Pale Rider way – this is High Plains Drifter territory, but nastier.

Williams’s direction is based on a kind of kitchen sink hyperrealism that regularly drifts in the direction of the feverish and the surreal, using the ugliest bits of the reality of Britain and turning them into thin places. There’s certainly a sense of flow and rhythm to the filmmaking here, but one that often takes stops and starts that very consciously break up the very satisfying structures of the vengeance movie, thereby mirroring and emphasising Bull’s brokenness.

Maskell’s performance is fantastic – the subtle differences he shows between the already horrible but also human Bull of the flashbacks and the horrifying machine of violence and resentment that borders on a more talkative slasher movie killer he turns into are as believable and effective as are his handful of emotional freak-out scenes in the Nic Cage manner. Thanks to this, the difference between what the character was and what he becomes carries an air of genuine sadness. Not because Bull ever was a good man, but because he was the kind of man who could have been good and now is something irredeemable.

And yes, the religious undertones are certainly there on purpose, as the final reveal makes perhaps a bit too clear.

In Darkness (2018)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the final twist and a lot of what comes before it, but it’s the film’s own damn fault!

Blind pianist Sofia (Natalie Dormer) leads a rather solitary life in London, clearly not having any close friends or family. One can’t help but get the impression that – outside of her work in an orchestra – stumbling onto her party girl upstairs neighbour Veronique (Emily Ratajkowski) from time to time is the closest human contact she’s got.

So it might come as a surprise to the audience when Sofia acoustically witnesses what sounds very much like the murder of Veronique and pretends neither to have known the girl nor to have heard the murder when questioned by the investigating policeman Mills (Neill Maskell). She also doesn’t mention how Veronique managed to get her a gig playing at a private party of the girl’s Serbian war criminal turned politically protected philanthropist father Radic (Jan Bijvoet).

Clearly, Sofia has some secrets of her own that somehow connect to the Yugoslavian Civil War - secrets so big, she doesn’t even come clean when she’s hunted for a USB stick Veronique managed to hide with her without her noticing. Also involved will be Radic’s right hand woman (Joely Richardson) and her brother and private hitman Marc (Ed Skrein). But we all know how professional killers are with blind women.

For the longest part of its running time, I was rather enamoured with Anthony Byrne’s In Darkness, particularly the immensely stylish ways the director finds to acoustically but also visually impress the importance of sound to its lead character, emphasising the sources of sounds and the way sound travels in the staging of many scenes.

It’s a visually rich and striking film, turning nights strangely colourful while still emphasizing the shadows at the core of its complicated and emotionally somewhat twisted plots, while never seeming to overindulge in technical trickery, creating an often dream-like world for its thriller plot to take place in instead of the surface realistically one many examples of the genre prefer. In this it shares – at least in my eyes – the feel of the best giallos, though there is, of course, a lot of Hitchcock visible too. Hitchcock is a rather unavoidable influence, really, for In Darkness doesn’t just wallow in the creation of atmosphere but is also equally adept at classicist suspense scenes, even sharing Hitchcock’s ability to turn moments that should be absolutely silly (the scene where Sofia attempts to hide a poison vial so that Radic doesn’t see it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever when you think about it, for example) into little nail biters. Some blind main character standard thriller scenes also make an appearance, but in Byrne’s hands, these turn out to be just as thrilling as they were the first time, many decades ago. There are also some wonderful action sequences, like the one where Marc saves Sofia from a bit of torture and murder, the film keeping the focus on the matter of factness with which Marc uses violence, showing instead of telling that he must do this sort of thing every day.

Dormer’s (who was also involved in the script) performance is wonderful too, at first suggesting all kinds of things going on behind a very calm facade, then always finding just the right measure for cracks in the facade to appear. She also manages – something that must be particularly difficult because this is the point where many a good performance in a thriller of this sort falters – to convince the audience that the moments when Sofia breaks down completely (and the film provides her with some psychologically nasty reasons for breaking down) are logical consequences of her character, her past, and what is happening right now, and not just the moments when the plot needs her to break down. The film has good performances all around, anyway. Especially Richardson’s Alex is a wonderfully sarcastic and ambiguous presence. Why, even Ed Skrein is sort of okay in this one.

As a movie about vengeance, In Darkness is a surprisingly complicated film too, never trying to convince the audience Sofia’s plan is either right or wrong, only that it feels like an emotional necessity to her, yet also acknowledging that she might very well be lying to herself there too. She is after, all lying to everyone else all of the time, too.


Which brings us to the film’s final plot twist, a moment so self-sabotaging and plain stupid it is difficult to reconcile it with the slick, self-assured and intelligent rest of the film. For, you see, Sofia isn’t actually blind, but apparently so deeply into The Method she’s even pretending to be blind when she’s home alone with only the camera to see her, able to block all her natural reflexes connected to her eyesight completely. Why she’s a real life Natalie Dormer, and Matt Murdock’s got nothing on her! Apart from the stupidity, needlessness - there’s no reason for her not to be blind apart from the film just wanting another plot twist – and somewhat ableist (never thought I’d use that word, but here we are) vibe of the twist, it also retroactively dumbs down what came before. Suddenly, at least half of the suspense sequences I enjoyed so much make now no sense whatsoever. The film’s concentration on sound? Just a distraction instead of a meaningful expression of its protagonist’s world through style. Half of Sofia’s actions? Utterly preposterous now. It’s as destructive a final plot twist as I’ve ever suffered through as a viewer; perhaps even worse is that I can’t even imagine why anyone involved might have thought this to be a good idea.

Kill List (2011)

Warning: structural spoilers ahoy.

Eight months after a job went wrong and left professional killer Jay (Neil Maskell) a depressed wreck (though it's not hard to suspect he already was a total mess before that event), money has finally run out. The marriage to his wife Shel (MyAnna Buring) - with whom he also has a child (Harry Simpson) - is going down the drain too, for Shel can't cope with Jay's breakdown nor the lack of money, nor Jay's pretending nothing at all to be wrong too well. So it comes as something of a relief to her when Jay's old partner Gal (Michael Smiley) and his new girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer) come to dinner and Gal offers Jay to partner up for a lucrative job.

It's a job in the UK, which won't keep Jay too long away from home, there's only a kill list of three and pretty big money in it, so the offer looks like a nice step back into the working life, such as it is.

Once the pair of killers gets the job started, their usual routine is broken by weird little occurrences that hint at something more complex, and much more terrible, than just bad people killing even worse ones. Why, for example, do the victims thank Jay? Sooner or later, the killers and the audience will find out. Not surprisingly, not everyone will like what he finds.

Despite having read some very positive reviews, I went into Ben Wheatley's Kill List with a certain degree of trepidation. Films built on a third act twist often tend to annoy me, and a third act twist whose existence I already know about is generally even less effective. However, Kill List isn't at all constructed like one of those twist-based films I expected. In fact, the characters' final doom is preordained nearly from the first shot, with clear moments of foreshadowing only the least attentive (like the IMDB commenters who seem to think the film "changes genres" about two thirds in) won't recognize as such. For my eyes, Kill List is constructed with a viewer who does by and large understand what's going on in mind. Wheatley's film tries and (at least in my case) very much succeeds at building a feeling of dread based on its audience's expectation of its story's outcome for its characters, building a mood of an inevitable doom that is disquieting and unnerving, and just a little bit cruel.

Speaking of cruelty, it is as surprising as it is impressive how nasty the film actually dares to get without feeling the need to be impressed by its own naughtiness, which is the thing (well, that and the horrible scripts) that, for example, ruined the Human Centipede films for me. There's nothing that makes a film less disturbing than when it shouts "Look how disturbing I am!" at you, so I'm glad Wheatley's film doesn't step into that trap.

Stylistically, Kill List is a clear successor of the UK's "social realism" school of filmmaking, with a love for mumbled dialogue (in part improvised, going by the credits) and shots that look much less artlessly constructed than they actually are. Usually, this style isn't my cup of tea at all, but in Kill List's case, the friction between the type of story a film shot in this style is normally allowed to tell and the story it actually is telling is just one element more that makes the film so brilliant at achieving its unnerving effect.

And unnerving Kill List truly turned out to be for me. Obviously, I'm someone who watches a lot of horror movies, but I'm generally only really disturbed or emotionally bothered by a handful of films per year. Kill List clearly belongs to this special group of films, the sort of movie that lingers in my mind, not exactly as something I'm afraid of, but as something I know I will carry with me for quite some time. In truth, I'm not quite sure I'll sleep all that well tonight - a (perhaps dubious) compliment for Wheatley's film. Clearly, this doesn't mean the film will have that kind of effect on everyone, for we all have different things bound to disturb our dreams; it is, however, not an achievement that should ever go unmentioned.

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