Sorry Charlotte, but your date’s a disaster
THIS is clearly meant to be a calling card for its first-time director, Barnaby Southcombe, so perhaps it shouldn’t be judged too harshly. There are signs of promise in the stylishness of the shooting and in his sympathetic direction of the actors. Southcombe has the good sense to employ his highly talented mother, Charlotte Rampling, to play his antiheroine, a woman in late middle-age with a haunted expression who goes speed-dating to find a man and runs into first a belligerent date from hell (Ralph Brown) and then a sad-eyed chief detective (Gabriel Byrne) who slowly — much too slowly — starts to believe she may be a murderer. Though the action supposedly takes place in modern London, it all too obviously occurs in an alternative reality on Planet Art-House. Byrne never does anything that’s remotely credible as a police inspector investigating a gruesome killing. It’s left to his second-in-command (Eddie Marsan) to do the legwork, and it’s small wonder that he gets frustrated with his boss. The very belated twist comes across as insufficiently inventive, and a cheat rather than a revelation. The pace throughout is too leisurely for a film with thriller elements, and — through no fault of her own — Rampling has to remain opaque and unfathomable until our patience is stretched way, way beyond breaking point. To have worked, this story needed a super-professional story-telling genius such as Alfred Hitchcock. Instead, it gets an arty novice who apparently wants to be the new Andrei Tarkovsky.