Steal, on Prime Video

The truth is governments steal from pension funds all the time. It’s politely called inflation. You could say these armed robbers are more honest about it. They force the money managers at Lochwood Capital to transfer four billion Pounds to an offshore account. Obviously, that sort of job requires an inside person. Zara Dunne would like to know who that is. Technically, she was the one that facilitated the larcenous transaction, admittedly at gunpoint. Consequently, her position becomes rather awkward during the aftermath in creator-writer Sotiris Nikias’s six-episode Steal, which premieres tomorrow on Prime Video.

The actual heist only takes one episode. Somehow, the gang knew Lochwood had temporarily moved 4 billion into cash accounts—and they chose the one day of the week when the executive committee meets, so they could approve the transfer (under duress). They still needed someone in operations to assure the bank everything was on the up and up. Dunne’s office pal Luke started the transfer, but when he froze, she stepped up. Initially, everyone was grateful for her quick thinking, but once the armed robbers left, the dire implications—for union and government pensioners—inevitably set in.

DCI Rhys Covac sounds reassuring while interviewing witnesses, but he has almost no leads to follow, thanks to the gang’s precautions, like prosthetics that defeat facial recognition software. It also seems like Covac is being set-up to fail, especially when MI-5 muscles in on the case. The DCI must also deal with the pressure of his gambling debts, which he must pay-off in seven days, or they will be sold off to underworld leg-breakers.

It is pretty obvious to DCI Covac and Darren Yoshida, the forensic financial crime investigator, that Dunne is not a particularly reliable witness, for various reasons, including her multiple personal and professional grievances. Nevertheless, Dunne reluctantly starts cooperating with Covac, after witnessing strong-arm tactics from both the robbers and MI-5.

Despite the tiresome whining over capital markets (as if any income not generated toiling in a factory or on a farm is necessarily illegitimate), Steal is grabby caper thriller that focuses on the getaway rather than the step-by-step planning and execution. The shadowy political and corporate intrigue duly keeps viewers guessing. Covac is also compellingly flawed. However, Nikias so thoroughly establishes Dunne’s unlikable loser status, spending screentime with her gets to be a real chore.

Baghead, on Shudder

Even Jon Taffer from Bar Rescue could not breathe life into the Queen’s Head, a British pub in Berlin. The industrial neighborhood is not great, but the witch in the basement is a tough nut to crack. When Iris Lark inherited the bar from her estranged father Owen, she became the evil entity’s keeper, whether she likes it or not, in Alberto Corredor’s Baghead, which premieres Friday on Shudder.

It has been decades since the Queen’s Head served a draft, but it is not going anywhere. Owen Lark tried to burn it down, but the ancient woman’s infernal power protected it. Unwisely, Lark put her name on the deed, making herself the eternal witch’s new keeper.

At first, she tries to exploit the bag-hooded woman’s power for financial benefit, just as her father once did, until he got too freaked out by her power. After ingesting a personal item, she/it can bring anyone back from the dead. You just pull off the bag and there is your favorite uncle, or whoever. However, after two minutes, she takes control over the beloved loved one’s features, to spew a hateful torrent of tormenting taunts.

Of course, the more a keeper pokes the witch, the more she gets in their heads. She is already digging her hooks into Lark, much to the alarm of her bossy friend, Katie. Yet, they keep letting the wealthy but sketchy Neil dial-up his late wife, even though it never ends well.

Baghead is a terrible title for a cool gothic/demonic horror film. First and foremost, Peter Mullan is spectacularly crusty and vinegary as old man Lark. Sure, he dies at the beginning, but Mullan is always so interesting on-screen, you know they will have to bring him back.

The Vanishing: Scotland’s Lighthouse Mystery

Lighthouse keeping is a quiet, lonely business, but it is fraught with occupational risks. There is a voluminous history of mysterious and tragic events occurring in isolated lighthouses that have suddenly inspired a clump of films. Following Chris Crow’s The Lighthouse, based on the very real “Small’s Lighthouse Incident,” the mysterious disappearance of the Flannan Isles light-keepers gets a fictionalized explanation in Kristoffer Nyholm’s The Vanishing (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

James Ducat is the garrulous family man. Thomas Marshall is the bitter, guilt-wracked widower. Donald McArthur is the obnoxious apprentice. The three light-keepers ought to be able to survive six weeks on the Isle together, but all bets are off when an unknown sailor and a mystery chest wash up on at the bottom of a coastal ravine. Naturally, McArthur is sent down to investigate, but he is forced to kill in self-defense when the unnamed man turns out to be healthier (and meaner) than he looked.

Even though Marshall (rightly) fears the chest could be a proverbial Pandora’s box, they soon discover its contents: a sturdy pair of work boots and several bars of gold bullion. Obviously, it would be a terrible shame if those boots went to waste. As for the gold, the three co-workers decide to split it, like the bag of cash in A Simple Plan. They agree to wait a full year before cashing in, to avoid suspicion, but they are caught flat-footed when the dead man’s fellow crew members come looking for him and his “cargo.”

As a thriller, The Vanishing is nothing extraordinary, but it has its merits, starting with Gerard Butler, who does his best work since Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus as Ducat. He starts out as quite the hail-fellow chap, but becomes increasingly unhinged as their situation becomes dire. Peter Mullan is one of the best thesps in the business, but the salty old Marshall is so solidly in his wheelhouse, he hardly breaks an acting sweat. Connor Swindells is fittingly annoying as McArthur, while Danish character actor Søren Malling is all kinds of leathery and sinister looking as the suspicious skipper.

Nyholm’s workmanlike helming captures the claustrophobia of the lighthouse, but he allows the tension to flag from time to time. However, cinematographer Jørgen Johansson fully capitalizes on the lonely, picturesque vistas of the Outer Hebrides locale.

The one-two punch of The Vanishing and Crow’s Lighthouse should be sufficient to dissuade most recent grads from considering lighthouse keeping as a career. Maybe someone will make a film about the notorious Bustard Head lighthouse in Australia, to really drive home the point. Of course, it is easy to see the appeal of lighthouse movies to filmmakers: small cast, one set, and the evocative image of a windswept tower rising above the rocks. The Vanishing has all that, plus Butler as you have rarely seen him before. It is a completely respectable film, but viewers can safely wait until it hits subscription-based streaming services. For eager lighthouse buffs, it opens today (1/4) in New York, at the Cinema Village and releases day-and-date on iTunes.

Sunset Song: Davies Adapts Grassic Gibbon

Many consider Lewis Grassic Gibbon the preeminent Scots novelist of the Twentieth Century—and he may have aspired to something like the Great Scots Novel with his Scots Quair trilogy. They were written in a kind of simplified Gaelic-flavored vernacular intended to be accessible to any English speaker buying them off a stall in London, while still reflecting a sort of cultural nationalism. If you call a baby a “bairne” in today’s Glasgow, someone will probably slug you, but it is just plain speaking to the residents of Grassic Gibbon’s Kinraddie. However, times are changing for the tenant farmers. The people are becoming far less tied to land. Unfortunately, the Twentieth Century will intrude in more tragic ways during the course of Terence Davies’ adaptation of Sunset Song (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

There are the stirrings of modernity in Chris Guthrie, but she still feels her ancestral connection to the earth. It is about the only thing her cruel, rigidly Calvinistic father John Guthrie ever gave her. She could have been a teacher, but she opts to stay at home to help her beleaguered mother and do her best to run interference for her rebellious brother Will. Eventually, circumstances even break her seemingly indestructible father, rendering him bed-ridden. Yet, even in such a state, he has fresh abuse to offer in the form of unwelcome incestuous advances.

Grassic Gibbon spared his heroine little and Davies is faithful to nearly every trial and tribulation. Briefly, Guthrie’s life appears to take a turn towards genuine happiness when she marries the deeply smitten Ewan Tavendale, but their wedded bliss is not to last. Unable to withstand the pressure from the rest of Kinraddie, Tavendale enlists for service in the great war to end all wars (which might be the last time Scotland was hawkish). Like most servicemen, Tavendale discovers modern warfare was not what he expected, except it is even worse for him.

Guthrie will evolve over the course of the trilogy, but Sunset is a story of basic emotional survival rather than empowerment. There is some tough stuff in the film, but the living was tough in rural Northeast Scotland at that time (it probably still is). Yet, it clearly reflects the sort of elegiac nostalgia that runs throughout Davies’ films. Clearly, he argues real dignity can be found in working the land—certainly more so than in trench warfare. In fact, the more familiar viewers are with Davies’ oeuvre, the more they will appreciate Sunset. Not unlike his near namesake Malick, his meditative and naturalistic inclinations requirement some acclimatization on the viewers’ part.

As one would expect, Michael McDonough’s cinematography is visually stunning, using the wheat fields as a rapturous canvas. However, the real shock is the visceral power of former model Agyness Deyn’s performance as Chris Guthrie. We see each new wound compound inside her and marvel as she ratchets up her resolve once again. Deyn was actually pretty good in Luis Prieto’s Pusher remake, but that was nothing like this. Her Chris Guthrie is worthy of being considered a hardscrabble Scarlet O’Hara.

Regrettably, Davies and the usually rock solid Peter Mullan portray John Guthrie as an incomprehensible monster. As a result, Chris Guthrie’s epiphany that her father was just an unfortunate product of his environment and her resulting grief is largely lost on viewers. Indeed, Davies seems to wallow in miserablism to an unhealthy extent.

Tomorrow will be another day for Chris Guthrie. It might in fact be rewarding to see Deyn reprise her role in treatments of the next two books, but Davies does not seem like a sequel kind of filmmaker. Judged discretely and formalistically, Sunset Song is aesthetically impressive and overwhelmingly exhausting. Recommended for Davies admirers and those who think they can take it, Sunset Song opens this Friday (5/13) in New York at the Film Forum downtown and the Lincoln Plaza uptown.

The Fixer: Peter Mullan Pulls the Strings

John Mercer has more buttons to push than an accordion. That makes him the perfect assassin for a shadowy, master manipulator on indefinite “leave” from the police force. Of course, he is also good at killing people. You could ask his aunt and uncle, but Mercer whacked them. Rest assured, he had good reason, or he couldn’t be the [anti-]hero of Ben Richards’ The Fixer, which premieres this Monday on KCET in Los Angeles.

Mercer was trained by the British Special Forces. Unlike the French, you would go feel comfortable going to war knowing they had your back. Unfortunately, while Mercer was away, his little sister was sexually abused by the orphans’ guardians, their now very late aunt and uncle. Clearly, Mercer was disappointed by their behavior. However, his hotheaded nature makes him an attractive recruit for Lenny Douglas. Apparently acting with the secret sanction of high ranking police authorities, Douglas runs a de facto hit squad for organized crime figures too powerful for traditional law enforcement to handle.

At least, that is how Douglas presents the gig to Mercer. The longer the suddenly rehabilitated ex-con works with his new puppet master, the more he comes to distrust him. Nevertheless, he sticks with it, so he can look after his troubled single-mother sister. He also is attracted to Rose Chamberlain, a former copper who now serves as Douglas’s designated seductress. Once again, Mercer finds himself rooming with his former cellmate, Calum McKenzie, who will provide “logistical” support, like breaking-and-entering and general scrounging. Their first targets will fall pretty easily in the first episode. The question will be whether Mercer can accept such a Faustian bargain.

The stakes will rise considerably in the second episode when Douglas tries to play kingmaker during a succession battle for control of London’s leading crime family. Things will get complicated when McKenzie accidentally kills Douglas’s preferred choice, a vile entitled little racist gangster brat. Matters are ostensibly more clear cut in the third episode (perhaps the best of series one) when Douglas turns the team loose on an Albanian gangster looking to expand into British territory, but his methods continue to trouble Mercer.

Mercer really starts to doubt Douglas in episodes four and five, when his targets reveal sensitive information that rock him back on his heels. It is particularly awkward learning Patrick Finch was his predecessor, because he is Mercer’s target and he has become a raging psychotic. Thus, it is rather inevitable things will come to a head between Mercer and Douglas in the conclusion of series one.

As Mercer, Andrew Buchan is refreshingly manly and pretty darned hardnosed. Mercer is worlds away from his best-known role, playing the father of the young murder victim in the original Broadchurch, but he carries it off well. Nevertheless, the real reason to watch The Fixer is to enjoy the great Peter Mullan sneering and scheming his way through each episode as Douglas. He is just a complete bastard, in the most entertaining way possible. Jody Latham arguably makes McKenzie, the goofball stoner, seem less annoying over time, which is certainly something, while Tamzin Outhwaite’s Chamberlain holds her own against Buchan and Mullan during some surprisingly harsh verbal sparring sessions.

The off-the-books morally-conflicted hitman is not a staggeringly new concept, but it is a durable one. In this case, the cast really kicks it up a notch, especially Mullan, who truly is one of the best in the business. His arrogant sarcasm is television gold. Recommended for fans of darker, attitude-heavy British crime dramas, The Fixer starts its broadcast run this coming Monday (3/28) on KCET.

Considine’s Tyrannosaur

If you think Leeds looks like a depressed town, just wait until you get a look at the characters’ private lives. Take for instance Joseph, a bitterly self-destructive widower. He will be the protagonist of actor Paddy Considine’s harrowing feature directorial debut, Tyrannosaur (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

If the goons from Trainspotting ever reached a certain age, they might look like Joseph, the aging hooligan. Dissipated and ornery, he accidentally kicks his dog to death in the opening scene. Profoundly remorseful, his roiling emotions launch him on a violent bender. Running from the brawls he started, Joseph finds unlikely sanctuary in the charity thrift shop run by Hannah, an Evangelical Christian of enormous patience.

For some reason, Joseph is drawn to return to Hannah’s store, almost out of a perverse need to repay her kindness with cruelty. Yet, as he begins to understand the miseries of her life, a difficult to quantify relationship begins to develop between. Despite her loving nature, Hannah is badly abused by her husband in ways that are not merely violent, but truly degrading. Meanwhile, Joseph also ruefully notes how the little boy living across the street is terrorized by his mother’s boyfriend. However, if you expect Joseph to organize the downtrodden underdogs of Leeds in an Oprah-style scheme of self-empowerment, you had better stay the heck away from Tyrannosaur.

Peter Mullan’s work as Joseph is absolutely staggering. It is hard to watch him, but impossible to turn away. He truly puts on an acting clinic in Tyrannosaur, schooling his better known peers rather savagely. Yet, his supporting cast hangs right with him, particularly including Olivia Colman, who is absolutely devastating as Hannah. They are both equally deserving of Oscar recognition as lead actors, but they have no chance, because Tyrannosaur (which takes its titles from one of Joseph’s uncomfortably revealing anecdotes) is one of the most depressing, spirit bludgeoning films you can probably ever hope to see.

As distressing as the death of Joseph’s dog might be (frankly, viewers should not get too attached to any animals or ailing people in Tyrannosaur), it is what happens to Colman’s character that really haunts you. Considine’s script (a fixer-upper from his short film Dog Altogether) toys with notions of redemption and forgiveness, but ultimately exploits Christianity as a straw man of false comfort. Yet, despite all the unrestrained inhumanity it depicts, Tyrannosaur is a deeply moral film. What happens is clearly wrong and that it continues is meant to be disturbing.

Viscerally powerful, Tyrannosaur is tough to shake. It is an excellent film, recommended for discriminating audiences, but probably not for the clinically depressed. It opens this Friday (11/18) in New York at the Angelika Film Center.

From Britain with Love: NEDS

The 1970’s were a decade of malaise and recession for the United Kingdom. Economic conditions were particularly bad in Scotland. For the uneducated and unskilled youth, the outlook was downright bleak. Young John McGill joins their delinquent ranks in Peter Mullan’s NEDS, which screens today as part of the From Britain with Love touring showcase at the IFC Center.

McGill was studious lad with aspirations of a journalism career in America. Perversely, his own teachers do their concerted best to stifle his ambition and self-esteem. Though he plugs away for a while, peer pressure finishes the job started by the leveling educational system. Eventually acquiescing to social realities, McGill seeks acceptance amongst the semi-organized gangs of NEDs, Non-Educated Delinquents. Of course, he hardly gets any positive reinforcement at home, but at least his absent elder brother Benny’s street cred greases his entrée into the hooligan life.

NEDS is a tragic film about the sheer waste of not just McGill’s potential but that of his contemporaries. It is a story very much of it time and place, where social mobility was discouraged from below just as much as from above (if not more so). Still, its inclusion in a showcase of British cinema (featuring the Union Jack in its logo) might be a tad controversial for many Scots, including the majority Scottish National Party.

Be that as it may, NEDS creates a strong sense of depressed 1970’s Glasgow with seamless period detail. While the “husky” Conor McCarron must be dashed big for fourteen, he is convincingly sullen and resentful. However, Mullan himself leaves the film’s most indelible impression as McGill alcoholic father. An abusive and broken man, his turn as the senior McGill is not a pretty picture, but it is a very human one.

Despite the fine performances (as characters who often seem as if they would be at home in Frederick Wiseman social welfare documentary), NEDS largely covers familiar ground. Mullan (currently best known for directing The Magdalene Sisters and his lead performance in Ken Loach’s My Name is Joe, but soon to be seen in Deathly Hollows part two) can definitely stage a rumble, but there are no surprises to be found in his naturalistic amorality tale.

Essentially, viewers will probably take away from NEDS just how badly the UK needed a middle class green grocer’s daughter to take the reins of government in 1979 (though one supposes this was hardly the intention). Respectable but never extraordinary, NEDS screens tonight (6/23) at the IFC Center and next Saturday (7/2) at the Howard Gilman Theater in the brand new and shiny Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.