The friendship between level-headed Sarah (TV’s Hustle star Kelly Adams) and impulsive Zoe (Lucy Evans) is the emotional core, as Zoe dumps her college course to surprise teacher boyfriend Malcolm (David Horton) in his flat and declare her undying love. There is a vague sense of unease in glimpsed locations, apparently in East London, where a bag lady squawks Cassandra-style warnings. But Watson can find no cinematic use for the city, and we’re soon stuck in Malcolm’s flat, along with wheelchair-bound Declan (Jonathan Rhodes) and his Goth girlfriend Kendra (Calita Rainford).
Declan is the ranting shock-jock of an internet radio station, when not leading the effort to burrow into the Vatican’s computers to find the original scrolls of the Torah. He intends to convert them into a three-dimensional version of the Bible Code (an actual conspiracy theory suggesting prophetic secrets are encoded in the Bible in a sort of apocalyptic Sudoku), which when translated will predict the future. When the connection is made, metal shutters slam down, keeping out interlopers and trapping Sarah and Zoe.
Watson’s lack of real interest in his fashionable, cod-Da Vinci Code themes is shown when the only somewhat religious character, Sarah, has to tell this trio of geniuses who have presumably been studying the Bible for years that an iconic passage about King Nebuchadnezzar is from the Book of Daniel. Finding out who killed Princess Di is meanwhile the first order of business for Zoe, when presented with time and space’s DNA. More arresting notions are flung out by disabled alpha male Declan - “Show them the futility of pretend economies!” he rants at the computer, as some of us have been doing since the banks first crashed. And this budget-strapped scenario’s potential is fully grasped in two stray lines, as Declan’s souped-up computers drag the Bible Code from the third into the seventh dimension (though explanations thankfully stop at the fourth): “The whole universe in one room. Maybe there is no one else!”
Watson is better when he limits his resources still further, putting his best actors into eerily lit, close-up confrontations. The rapid-fire philosophical exchange on God between Declan and Sarah on his radio show, and Declan’s taunting of Kendra towards suicide, are briefly gripping. Mostly, though, the three dimensions currently available to Watson are left full of holes. When this world ends, it isn’t missed.
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