Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)

One decision – one small mistake – can change everything. Federal police detective Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) attempts to coerce further information about an international money laundering scheme from a company employee, Alice Russell (Anna Torv) but she refuses to give him any further information when he approaches her on the school run. The next day, she embarks on a corporate team-building hiking retreat to the rainforest in the (fictitious) Giralang Ranges of Victoria with four other company employees, her boss Jill Bailey (Deborra-Lee Furness), childhood friend Lauren (Robin McLeavy) and sisters Brianna aka Bree (Lucy Ansell) and Bethany aka Beth (Sisi Stringer). Three days later, Falk receives an incomprehensible phonecall from Alice which quickly drops out, only to later be informed by fellow agent Carmen Cooper (Jacqueline McKenzie) that Alice’s hiking partners had returned from their trip injured and Alice is missing. Suspecting something has happened to her due to her being a whistle blower, Falk and Cooper quickly join the search to find her. In flashbacks, it is revealed that Falk’s mother Jenny (Ash Ricardo) also disappeared from the same area during a hiking trip with him (Archie Thomson) and his father Erik (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor). After tirelessly searching for her for days, the pair finally found her injured and malnourished but she ultimately died shortly afterwards in hospital. Alice’s co-workers reveal that during the first night of the trip, Jill’s husband Daniel (Richard Roxburgh) who was responsible for the laundering scheme, met up with the group and led Alice away from them. Afterwards, Alice became frantic and desperate to leave the trip early even after Daniel has left. Brianna, who’s been hospitalised due to a bite from a funnel web spider, reveals that she’d misread the map in her hungover state and caused the group to become lost. While attempting to follow the river back home, the map falls into the water and Lauren is injured while attempting to retrieve it. Bethany later admits to Falk that she previously had a drug problem, which had resulted her in serving jail time due to her neighbours reporting her for selling her sister’s belongings for drug money, which resulted in Alice not trusting her. The group continues on and Jill finds out that Alice has seemingly been intentionally leading the group in the wrong direction and becomes furious. The next day, the group discovers an abandoned cabin and decide to stay there for the night despite Alice’s protests. Later on, they discover the gravesite of a dog, causing Alice to insist they may be on the hunting grounds of an infamous serial killer who lured his female victims using his dog, but the group brushes her fear off as her trying to persuade them to leave the cabin … Your mind starts to play tricks on you out there. You get really paranoid. That talented Australian novelist Jane Harper wrote one of the best novels of the past decade The Dry and following its successful adaptation starring the great Eric Bana a followup was destined to be on the cards – the 2017 novel Force of Nature came first and this adaptation was made in 2022 in a very different and non-dry environment. Perhaps it should be called The Damp. Everyone is soaking. Moving deep into the undergrowth of the rainforest acts as a kind of metaphor for a story that has many tangled strands – Aaron’s own psyche and past, his association with whistleblower Alice, her school-age daughter Margot’s (Ingrid Torelli) alleged bullying of her colleague Lauren’s daughter Rebecca (Matilda May Pawsey), the financial misdeeds at Alice’s company boss and the crimes of a four decades-old serial killer in the very area Alice is missing. Knitting these together into a coherent screen story seems almost impossible very quickly particularly when the four remaining women’s recollections resemble those of Rashomon – overlapping, contradictory and untruthful. Linking the search for Alice with Aaron’s retracing his steps into his own history with a trip taken alongside his parents seems a trope too far – and one presumes it forms a link to the notorious serial killer – yet clever construction, transitions and characterisation through the twists and turns of a mystery plot ultimately keep everything from tipping too far into the realm of coincidence or predictability. The local police sergeant Vince King (Kenneth Radley) wonders why Aaron is really out here, a long way from finance fraudsters. Paired with the brusque Carmen, Aaron’s forced introspection means that the flashbacks conjoining his mother’s predicament with Alice’s situation force them – or squeeze them – into the same narrative loop. The undercurrent of female relationships – at work, mothering, friendship and colleagues – with their basis in bullying is never far from the surface. And could they be any worse prepared for this trek? Can we just keep this between the five of us please? And, the quid pro quo into which Alice has been forced by the feds for what she was prepared to do for her daughter is the moral quandary that literally turns this in to a guilt trip writ large, adding melodrama to an already busy screenplay. Everyone has reason to dislike and even motive to kill Alice but we find ourselves asking why sisters are working at the same company and why Alice and Lauren are friends. It seems unlikely. Perhaps this structure dilutes the impact of the first film with the multiple storylines and one unresolved plot issue but Bana is somehow the still centre of the complications, a restless soul with a desk job whose past knowledge of the territory makes it more navigable. Even with a background in tragedy however this doesn’t have the emotional resonance it strives for and the mood is broken by issues of plotting placing it at some distance from a famous Aussie film about a disappearance, Picnic at Hanging Rock. It helps that this is lined out with some of the country’s best (and best known) actors with Torv now an international name thanks to TV’s The Newsreader, while Furness, a scene-stealing Roxburgh and an underused McKenzie are a pleasingly familiar ensemble, driven by a powerful score from Peter Raeburn. Beautifully shot in a number of Victoria parklands by Andrew Commis, this is written and directed by Robert Connolly, reprising his role from the first film. At least out there Nature holds us all to account

BlackBerry (2023)

We call it PocketLink. 1996: Waterloo, Ontario. The co-founder and CEO Mike Lazirides (Jay Baruchel) of Research in Motion and his best friend and co-founder Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson) are preparing to pitch their ‘PocketLink” cellular device to businessman Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). Lazaridis is bothered by the incessant buzzing of Balsillie’s Chinese intercom and fixes it before Balsillie arrives to the meeting. Their pitch is unsuccessful but when Balsillie is fired from his job due to his aggressive ambition, he agrees to work with them provided he is made CEO of RIM and given one half of the company. They hesitate but after they confirm Basillie’s suspicion that their deal with US Robotics was a malicious attempt to bankrupt them, they bring Balsillie in as co-CEO with one third of RIM for a cash infusion that requires Balsillie to mortgage his house. Balsillie arranges a pitch for the PocketLink with Bell Atlantic and forces Fregin and Lazaridis to build a crude prototype overnight which he and Lazaridis take to New York. Lazaridis forgets the prototype in their taxi, leaving Balsillie to attempt the pitch alone. Lazaridis recovers the prototype at the eleventh hour and finishes the pitch, rebranding the PocketLink as the ‘BlackBerry’ which becomes massively successful. 2003: Palm CEO Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes) plans a hostile takever of RIM which forces Balsillie to try to raise RIM’s stockprice by selling more phones than Bell Atlantic’s (now Verizon Communications) network can support. This crashes the network, as Lazaridis had warned, so Balsillie poaches engineers from around the world to fix the problem, as well as hiring a man named Charles Purdy (Michael Ironside) as RIM’s COO to keep the engineers in line but this upsets Fregin who values the casual fun work environment he and Lazaridis had created. The new engineers fix the network issue under Purdy’s strict management enabling RIM to avoid Yankowski’s buyout. 2007: RIM’s upcoming pitch of the BlackBerry Bold to Verizon is thrown into chaos when Steve Jobs announces the iPhone … You’re not selling togetherness any more. You’re selling self-reliance. The story of the original smartphone is equal parts horrifying and hilarious. The original Canadian tech bros vs their own boss (with differences cleverly signalled by their in-car musical choices) whose acquisitiveness culminates in a funny aeroplane chase across the US trying to buy out the National Hockey League is on the money when it comes to the cultural differences between creatives and financiers. Maybe we could call it the prophet: profit margin. The core initially is the long-term friendship between Mike and Doug which is gradually usurped by Mike’s dealings with the reptilian Jim who is performed with vainglorious precision by Howerton. His presence prises the friends apart as Mike cannot handle the pressure and Doug cannot comprehend his fraility. This has the virtues of a whistleblower-style docudrama, recounting that insanely good idea to combine a cellphone with a pager and email. The dark moment when Steve Jobs announces the iPhone triggers a chain reaction of events of a desperation that is blackly comic and (almost) tragic. Mike’s presentation to Verizon is a model of a public nervous breakdown. How a small operation of laidback tech geniuses is transformed into an impersonal profit-driven major player (albeit briefly) with grownups in the once friendly groovy music-filled workplace being supervised as though they’re retarded teens in a silent call centre is sobering but explains much about our paranoid surveillance society and the men who control it. This razor-sharp comedy drama is directed by co-star Matt Johnson from a screenplay co-written with producer Matthew Miller. I created this entire product class!

The Second Woman (1950)

There must be a reason. There’s always a reason for everything. Architect Jeff Cohalan (Robert Young) is haunted by the death of his fiancée Vivian Sheppard (Shirley Ballard) the boss Ben’s (Henry O’Neill) daughter the previous year. He sequesters himself in the modernist clifftop house he designed for himself and his beloved and broods over the incredible string of bad luck he has experienced since her death. His horse breaks its leg in its stable, his dog dies, his rose bush suddenly dies and a striking watercolour portrait by a dead local artist is deteriorating despite not being exposed to sunlight. Fortunately, his neighbour Amelia Foster’s (Florence Bates) CPA niece Ellen (Betsy Drake) a newcomer who has encountered Jeff on the train, takes an interest in his travails, and is determined to discover the real cause behind his misfortune, seemingly engineered by his workplace rival Keith Ferris (John Sutton) who has just divorced office secretary Dodo (Jean Rogers) and now has his sights on old Sheppard’s fortune. Local doctor Hartley (Morris Carnovsky) is convinced Jeff is mentally ill, guiltily replaying his suffering after taking the blame for Vivian’s death … Six accidents and every one of them killed something you love. It takes a while for this film noir-ish mystery to kick into gear but after the distraction of some on-the-nose dialogue, a poor score and the kind of shooting style familiar from live TV plays of the period it soon assumes the mantle of a clever gaslighting in reverse – a man is the victim in a drama displaying several Gothic tropes: a spooky portrait, a staircase, flashbacks, distinct shades of paranoia and all set in the interesting and highly dramatic seaside backdrop of Costa Del Rey, California, with waves as crashing accompaniment to the downfall of a decent man. Naturally the psychological element is personified in the local (but invariably European) GP who thinks he knows more about psychiatry than he possibly could and peddles the idea that persecuted Jeff is nuts: Interesting subject – who’s sane and who isn’t. Young’s affability is nimbly exploited as even his professional reputation is shattered while Drake is given one of her rare significant leads, both controlling the outcome and occasionally lending her thoughts to the voiceover, a welcome instance of a woman’s agency and investigative capacity in this sub-genre. Ferris practically twirls his moustache as the smarmy pantomime villain of the piece. A most unusual modern paranoid man’s thriller with plenty of good aspects to override the occasionally problematic direction by James V. Kern who did one more feature and then had a prolific career in television. Written by Mort Briskin & Robert Smith. Perhaps that’s why a woman gets out of proportion to a man

Capricorn One (1978)

A funny thing happened on the way to Mars. Three astronauts Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), Peter Willis (Sam Waterston) and John Walker (O.J. Simpson) are about to launch into space on the first mission to Mars. But when a mechanical failure surfaces that would kill the three men, NASA chief Dr James Kelloway (Hal Holbrook) removes them from the Capricorn One capsule otherwise their funding will be pulled by Washington. To prevent a public outcry, NASA secretly launches the capsule unmanned and requires the astronauts to film fake mission footage in a studio in the middle of the desert. They do so under fear of their families being killed on a plane bringing them back home. However, the plan is compromised when ambitious TV journalist Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould) starts reading deeply into a message Brubaker has broadcast to his wife Kay (Brenda Vaccaro) after his friend at NASA Elliot Whitter (Robert Walden) suddenly disappears when he detected the TV signals ahead of the capsule transmissions. When Caulfield’s brakes are tampered with he visits Mrs Brubaker at home to watch some innocuous home movies which confirm his suspicions that the mission is faked then finds the FBI in his apartment framing him for drug possession … With that kind of technology you can convince people of almost anything. Conspiracy theories ahoy! Director Peter Hyams’ screenplay exploits the story that won’t go away about the televised Apollo moon landing and extrapolates a juicy suspenser with an amiable cast. Not in the same league as the major paranoid thrillers of the era, it’s still bright and breezy and pretty plausible given the deniability factors and the political mood. Of cult value for the (non-)performance of Simpson with Karen Black along to help the wonderfully ironic Gould (whose dialogue is superior to the rest of the cast’s) get his man. And then there’s a crop dusting scene that of course recalls North by Northwest – in reverse! With Kojak at the helm! Godalmighty this is a lot of fun but there’s one horrifying scene in the noonday sun that will make you weep. It’ll keep something alive that shouldn’t die

Come Back, Little Sheba (1952)

You and Marie are nothing but a couple of sluts. Twenty years after their shotgun marriage, their child dead and their little dog lost for months, dowdy Lola Delaney (Shirley Booth) rents out a room in the house she shares with her recovering alcoholic husband, chiropractor Doc (Burt Lancaster). The pretty college student Marie Buckholder (Terry Moore) does life drawings in the living room of track star jock Turk Fisher (Richard Jaeckel) and Lola enjoys watching them fall in love. Their carry on aggravates Doc who infers that they are engaged in sexual shenanigans despite being told that Marie is engaged to someone else. He compares Lola to Marie and his obsession ultimately drives him back to the bottle despite his two year membership of Alcoholics Anonymous which had got him back on track … I can’t spend my time kissing all the girls. Booth was recreating her acclaimed stage role (and it won her an Academy Award in her screen debut at 54) and Lancaster gives a great, mature performance in a William Inge play that reads like a suburban take on A Streetcar Named Desire: just how big is this house and how long is this woman going to stay in the spare room? Adapted by Ketti Frings, Lola is slatternly and useless but enormously endearing, Doc is remote and difficult but somehow admirable. His paranoia is not far from the surface and peppy Marie gets under his skin. His concealed passion destroys his resolve but Lola treats Marie like a daughter, unaware of his conflict until she opens the cupboard to make cocktails. He has never forgiven her for the forced marriage that stopped him training as a proper doctor and then Lola lost the baby. When his pent-up violent anger finally erupts it’s shocking. It’s a persuasive picture of long-festering marital resentments, fixation on the brevity of youthful beauty and loss and a signature film of kitchen sink realism. Directed by Delbert Mann. Alcoholics are mostly disappointed men

The Invisible Man (2020)

He needs you because you don’t need him. Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) is trapped in an abusive relationship with wealthy optics engineer Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen).  When she escapes from his home her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer) helps her hide out with good friend San Francisco Police Detective James Lanier (Aldis Hodge) and his teenage daughter Sydney (Storm Reid). Two weeks later it appears Adrian has committed suicide but Cecilia feels she’s being watched. Her interview for an architectural firm is ruined when she arrives without her portfolio and she collapses after being drugged with Diazepam. Then she stages a reconciliation meal with her sister after confusion over an email sent from her account without her knowledge and Emily has her throat cut in front of her and Cecilia is arrested and placed in a secure unit. Adrian’s lawyer brother Tom (Michael Dorman) tells her she needs to have the baby she’s been told she’s having after Adrian replaced her contraceptive drugs and if she does she’ll live with him again and not go to prison. When the police refuse to believe her story, she decides to take matters into her own hands and fight back … He’s not out there. I promise. An ingenious reworking of the original H.G. Wells novel, hitting the contemporary staging posts of coercive control, gaslighting, stalking and surveillance, with technology taking top billing in a classic story of female paranoia. The morbid mood is brilliantly sustained by dint of point of view camera, simple composition and use of space; the tension is cunningly heightened as the tropes of horror and thrillers are ticked one by one. Moss gives a tour de force performance in a film that features her in every scene. The best horror film since It Follows and that’s saying something.What a good idea it was to move away from the idea of Universal’s concept of the Dark Universe in favour of standalone stories. Quite brilliant. Written and directed by Leigh Whannell. This is what he does and he’s doing it again

The End of the Affair (1955)

Trust is a variable quality. London during World War 2. Novelist Maurice Bendrix (Van Johnson) meets Sarah Miles (Deborah Kerr) the wife of civil servant Henry Miles (Peter Cushing) at their sherry party. He is asking Henry for information to help with his next book. Maurice is intrigued by Sarah after he sees her kissing another man. They become lovers that night at his hotel. After his rooms are bombed when they are together there, she ends their relationship and he suffers from the delayed shock from the bombing and from her ending the affair. After their break-up and the end of the war, Bendrix encounters Henry, who invites him for a drink at his home, especially since Sarah is out.  Henry confides that he suspects Sarah is unfaithful and has looked into engaging a private investigator, but then decides against it. Sarah returns home before Bendrix leaves and is curt with him. Bendrix follows through with hiring a private detective agency on his own account. They come across information which suggests that Sarah is being unfaithful, which Bendrix shares with Henry in revenge. Bendrix then obtains Sarah’s diary via the private investigator Albert Parkis (John Mills) which reveals that Sarah is not having an affair and that she promised God to give Bendrix up if he was spared death in the bombing. Then they meet again … I’ve learned that you must pray like you make love – with everything you have. A deeply felt narrative revolving around love, sex and religious belief sounds like a melodramatic quagmire but Lenore Coffee’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1951 semi-autobiographical novel is a rich textured work with impressive performances by the entire cast. Kerr and Johnson might be perceived to be something of a mismatch but that’s the point of the story:  he is fated to forever misunderstand her and as he tries to navigate his way through her complex emotions and her deals with God, he responds with just one emotion – jealousy. His unruly misunderstanding in a world of good manners and looking the other way means he flails hopelessly while we are then persuaded of her beliefs via her diary, the contents of which dominate the film’s second half, leading him to regret his desire for revenge. Love doesn’t end just because we don’t see each other. The ensemble is well presented and their individual big moments are sketches of superb characterisation, Mills’ pride in his snooping a particular highlight. It’s extraordinarily well done, very touching and filled with moments of truth which never fail to hit home in a story that is cunningly managed and beautifully tempered with empathy. Kerr is simply great. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. The ‘not done’ things are done every day. I’ve done most of them myself

The Wolf Hour (2019)

I don’t like to leave here. In 1977’s summer heatwave, New York City descends into violence with looting and rioting. Once-celebrated feminist author June Leigh (Naomi Watts) is afraid to leave her grandmother’s South Bronx walkup while the city burns. But it’s nothing new – she hasn’t left in years. Her groceries are delivered by Freddie (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) from the store; she’s afraid to touch the garbage piling up on the floor with the noise of insects inside; the only contact she has with people is over the telephone. She can’t write the novel she’s been threatening for a long time. She is tormented by someone ringing her doorbell several times a night. She leaves a message for her sister Margot (Jennifer Ehle) to ask for money. When Margot shows up and evinces despair at June’s living conditions we recognise something traumatic has happened and a TV recording reveals an interview she did about her novel The Patriarch that created a devastating chasm in her family. Then the lights go out … The world gives back what you give to it. A weirdly timely look at the paranoia of someone who’s afraid to leave their own home – Watts even dons a facemask when her sister does the cleanup, afraid there’s a dead body on the premises. June looks out at the world in a state of some distress. It’s initially a portrait of a paranoid individual, then it’s a glimpse at the observational lifestyle of a particularly nervy and reclusive writer, then it’s a portrait of a someone suffering trauma. The arrival of three people trigger the action and story development – Freddie from the store who wants to wash himself in her bathroom; Officer Blake (Jeremy Bobb), a creepy policeman answering her call for help a week late with designs on her; Billy (Emory Cohen) the rent boy who gratifies her need for sex and finally checks out what’s happening downstairs – are classic dramatic characters. It’s the call from her agent that makes June wake up however with a month to produce her work. The tension as we wait to see if Freddie makes that drop is stomach churning. When Watts lets go and dances to music (in a score composed by Daniel Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans) we empathise with her brief liberation from a hibernation that is clearly outside her control. Written and directed by Alistair Banks Griffin, this is strangely comforting lockdown viewing when everything is back to basic survival mode. Is that you?

The Upturned Glass (1946)

The man who is prepared to pursue his own ethical convictions even to the point of murder. Prosperous British neurosurgeon Michael Joyce (James Mason) falls in love with the married mother Emma Wright (Rosamund John) of a girl Ann (Ann Stephens) he saves in an operation. They carry on an affair which she abruptly terminates. When Emma falls to her death from the bedroom window of her holiday home Michael notices at the inquest that her shrewish sister-in-law Kate Wright (Pamela Kellino) is guiding Ann’s answers and comes to realise she is implicated in the death of the woman he loved. He swears revenge and initiates a relationship with Kate who he discovers is deeply greedy but he feels compelled to talk about the case at one of his regular medical school lectures … A doctor dispenses death and healing with blind impartiality. Mason gets to unleash both sadistic and masochistic elements of performance in this wonderfully complex and brilliantly told melodrama of love and vanity, obsession, passion and revenge, a project he and his wife Kellino dreamed up for themselves (having started out as a chronicle of the Brontë family under the same title!). Kellino’s co-writer Jno P. Monaghan, an American serviceman, has a small role as an American soldier who encounters Mason stuck on the road in a car with Kellino’s body inside. It’s a glossily made noir with a truly inspired storytelling style – the framing story becomes something else:  a subtle and unwitting confession by a reliable narrator! Talk about fatalistic! – and it’s glossily shot. A disarming film with a really amazing philosophy unspooling behind the narrative, with Dr Farrell  (Brefni O’Rorke) there to provide the killer psychological blow after a redeeming surgery takes place. Kellino is a revelation – a nasty piece of work who elicits sympathy; while Stephens is the image of Irish actress Jessie Buckley which is a little disturbing in a 75-year old film because she too was a singer and made a classic recording of Teddy Bear’s Picnic. She would make another film with this director, Lawrence Huntington, The Franchise Affair. She died shockingly young, aged 35 in 1966. Produced by Mason with Betty Box and Sydney Box. Man doesn’t have any generous feelings – he only thinks he has. Selfishness, habit and hard cash – those are his real motives

The Romantic Englishwoman (1975)

Women are an occupied country. Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) is the bored wife of a successful English pulp writer Lewis Fielding (Michael Caine) who is currently suffering from writer’s block. She leaves him and their son David (Marcus Richardson) and runs away to the German spa town of Baden-Baden. There she meets Thomas (Helmut Berger), who claims to be a poet but who is actually a petty thief, conman, drug courier and gigolo. Though the two are briefly attracted to each other, she returns home. He, hunted by gangsters headed by Swan (Mich[a]el Lonsdale) for a drug consignment he has lost, follows her to England. Lewis, highly suspicious of his wife, invites the young man to stay with them and act as his secretary. Lewis embarks on writing a screenplay for German film producer Herman (Rene Kolldehoff) – a penetrating psychological story about The New Woman. Initially resenting the presence of the handsome stranger now installed in their home as her husband’s amanuensis and carrying on with the nanny Isabel (Béatrice Romand), Elizabeth starts an affair with him and the two run away with no money to Monaco and the South of France. Lewis follows them, while he in turn is followed by the gangsters looking for Thomas… It’s about this ungrateful woman who is married to this man of great charm, brilliance, and integrity. She thinks he won’t let her be herself, and she feels stuck in a straitjacket when she ought to be out and about and taking the waters and finding herself. With a cast like that, this had me at Hello. Director Joseph Losey’s customarily cool eye is lent a glint in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Thomas Wiseman’s novel (with the screenplay co-written by the author) in a work that teeters on the edges of satire. A house bristling with tension is meat and drink to both Stoppard and Losey, whose best films concern the malign effects of an interloper introducing instability into a home.  It’s engineered to produce some uncanny results – as it appears that Lewis the novelist is capable of real-life plotting and we are left wondering if Elizabeth’s affair has occurred at all or whether it might be him working out a story. Perhaps it’s his jealous fantasy or it might be his elaborate fictionalising of reality:  these interludes of adultery occur when he’s at the typewriter. Invariably there are resonances of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad but it’s far funnier. Like that film, it’s something of an intellectual game with a mystery at its centre. Aren’t you sick of these foreign films? Viewed as a pure exploration of writerly paranoia as well as the marital comedy intended by the novel, it’s a hall of mirrors exercise also reminiscent of another instance of the era’s art house modernism, The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  The flashback/fantasy elevator sequence that is Lewis’ might also belong to Elizabeth. You might enjoy the moment when Thomas mistakes Lewis for the other Fielding (Henry) but he still hangs in there without embarrassment and seduces all around him. Or when Lewis suggests to his producer that he make a thriller rather than the more subtle study he’s suggesting – and then you realise that’s what this British-French co-production becomes. It’s richly ironic – Lewis and Elizabeth have such a vigorously happy marriage a neighbour (Tom Chatto) interrupts a bout of al fresco lovemaking but none of them seems remotely surprised, as if this is a regular occurrence. And any film that has Lonsdale introduce himself as the Irish Minister for Sport has a sense of humour. And there’s the matter of the German producer who bears a passing resemblance to Losey and Berger’s accomplice who fleetingly reminds us of Luchino Visconti, Berger’s mentor and lover for much of the Seventies. If it seems inconsistent there is compensation in the beauty of the performances (particularly Jackson’s, which is charming, warm and funny – All she wanted was everything!) and the gorgeous settings, with a very fine score by Richard Hartley. The elegance, precision and self-referentiality make this a must for Losey fans. It was probably a tricky shoot – Jackson and Berger couldn’t stand each other, allegedly. And Caine placed a bet that he could make the director smile by the end of the shoot. He lost. Wiseman commemorated his experience with Losey in his novel Genius Jack. It’s not kind. This, however, is a sly treat you don’t want to miss. You are a novelist, an imaginer of fiction.