The Shadow Line

It's got a great opening: awesome opening shot of a tiny car in a miasmic darkness, two creepy policeman who deliver a Jacobean prologue. The Shadow Line is stylishly done. And it's well populated too. For the first ten minutes you're going: “Oo it's him of...” or “That's her from that...” But it rapidly loses its charm. The characters, both the ostensible good guys and the bad guys, are endlessly confrontational in way that is supposed to suggest MORAL AMBIGUITY and the writer/director, Hugo Blick, clearly had great fun coming up with a plethora of inventive ways to call someone a c**t.

But the overall result is a deluge of dialogue that is needlessly portentous and rarely realistic. The characters exist in some strange, Beckettian parallel dimension where exposition is conveyed via impenetrable non sequiturs – to such an extent that for ages I honestly didn't realise one of the characters had Alzheimer's.

In its favour, The Shadow Line is wonderfully dense and has some way to go. I just worry that at the moment a lot of it seems to pivot on what looks to be an implausible bit of plotting. Oh, and at climactic points the incidental score goes absolutely ballistic. Which is really irritating.

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