London Fields (2018)

 

The beautiful and enigmatic Nicola Six has (or at the very least, believes she has) psychic premonitions.  When she has a vision of her own murder on her 30th birthday, she identifies two very different men as the most likely possible culprits.  These are taxi driver Keith Talent, a crude slob who despite not being very bright, excels at darts; and Guy Clinch, a wealthy businessman who is trapped in a loveless marriage with his wife Hope.

Far from using this foresight to save herself, the vain and narcissistic Nicola embraces it as opportunity to never grow old.  She sets out to seduce and emotionally destroy both men, thereby ensuring that the foreseen murder comes to pass.  She even goes so far as to inform terminally ill American writer Samson Young of her vision, employing him to write the story and immortalise her in the process.

I freely confess to watching this movie entirely from a sense of morbid curiosity; it boasts a fantastic cast, but got terrible reviews and is based on a book I loathed, because it's a pompous, misogynistic, misanthropic pile of dung with a preposterous premise and filled with hateful characters doing implausible things.  

So when I sat down to watch London Fields, I had one simple question on my mind: was it possible to actually make a decent film out of this pile?  

It turns out that the answer is "no", but the movie is at least 30% less awful than the book, so yay for that.  Having charismatic actors definitely helps. For instance, in the book, Keith Talent is a completely preposterous and implausible character. In the film, he's still a nasty bit of work but actor Jim Sturgess manages to provide him with a kind of desperate, thuggish charm that the novel's prose definitely did not convey.

On the subject of the cast, Amber Heard got a Golden Raspberry nomination for worst actress, which seems to be to be thoroughly unjustified.  Yes, the film is bad and her character is an awful, implausible sociopath whose motives and actions are nonsense, but her performance within those constraints is actually really rather good.  It's ridiculous that  her performance was the film's only nomination, when it far more deserved to be on the Worst Film and Worst Screenplay lists. To be honest, this smacks a little of the same kind of misogyny that was replete within the book.

Speaking of Heard, the camera spends a lot of time ogling her in skimpy outfits.  This would normally annoy me intensely as egregious voyeurism for the sake of voyeurism, but I think in this role it's actually purposeful: it's a visual cue for the character's nature, particularly given that there is ultimately almost no actual bare flesh. Nicola Six is all about titillation, tease and unfulfilled promises of intimacy, never about fulfilling them.

It's also still voyeurism, mind you. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.

So in the final analysis the film is bad, and you should skip it, but I think it's about as good as it could be given the source material.  Why you'd want to adapt the source material in the first place is the bigger question, to be honest.