London Film Festival 2025 - crime, punishment, pop stars and shrinks

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

The third of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out mysteries finds Daniel Craig reprising his role of the sly and knowing sleuth Benoit Blanc (now sporting a deeper-than-ever Deep South accent), as he probes the baffling case of the death of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Played with brio by Josh Brolin, the Monsignor presides over his little rural parish of Chimney Rock, in upstate New York, with an iron hand, raging from his pulpit like an Old Testament prophet. Raining down fire and brimstone on his small coterie of disciples, subjecting them to a kind of coercive control, he likes nothing better than goading members of his congregation to walk out in disgust.

But things begin to change when the diocese sends him a new associate, Father Jud Duplenticy. Jud, a former boxer, has blotted his spiritual copybook by punching out one of his clerical superiors, and is dispatched to Chimney Rock by Bishop Langstrom (a small but endearingly wry role for Jeffrey Wright) to do suitable penance. Jud is superbly played by Josh O’Connor, formerly known as Prince Charles from The Crown, and he walks the hard road from confusion to spiritual conviction with aplomb.

Johnson has assembled an elite band of actors for the occasion, who are all given space to put their particular stamp on the drama. Glenn Close puts heart and soul into Martha, Wicks’s fanatically loyal disciple, while Andrew Scott sweatily depicts the desperation of struggling author Lee Ross. Jeremy Renner plays Dr Nat Sharp, who we wouldn’t necessarily trust with our lives, and Kerry Washington, Cailee Spaeny and Mila Kunis each brings a distinctive tone to the unfolding narrative. Daryl McCormack plays Cy, whose distinctly un-spiritual acquisitiveness plants a Musk-like bomb under the proceedings.

There is, of course, a murder which throws a spanner in the works. Johnson has had some fun with the time-honoured “locked room” mystery (John Dickson Carr’s novel The Hollow Man is generously name-checked in this regard), and the dastardly deed is the key to unlocking a lurid history of betrayal, deceit and a vanishing $80m fortune. There’s even a little bit of reincarnation for good measure. The denouement feels a trifle over-stretched, as if Johnson was having so much fun that he couldn’t quite bear to bring his picaresque, mock-gothic romp to a conclusion, but this is a hugely entertaining addition to the Knives Out canon. 

Ballad of a Small Player 

Director of last year’s splendid Conclave, Edward Berger comes bouncing back with this intriguing and rather haunting fable. Screenwriters Rowan Joffe and Lawrence Osborne have based the story on Osborne’s’s similarly-named novel, and it’s the story of compulsive gambler Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell), who we find ensconced in a hotel room in Macau but running short of both luck and money. He’s racking up a mountain of debt at the gambling tables and via the consumption of industrial quantities of caviar and champagne, and the arrival of the police is only a matter of time. But he’s certain he can make one big score and clear his debts.

A casino hostess, Dao Ming (Fala Chen, pictured above with Farrell), can see Doyle sinking helplessly into a bottomless pit of addiction and desperation even as he’s trying to maintain a facade of noblesse oblige, but she’s able to come to his aid in ways he couldn’t possibly have foreseen.

Part satire and part philosophical journey, the film is driven by Farrell’s compelling performance. The entire narrative falls on his shoulders for large chunks of the running time, but he handles it with aplomb (although not without breaking sweat, as the walls remorselessly close in around him). Equally indispensable are the locations in Macau and Hong Kong, beautifully and hauntingly shot by cinematographer James Friend. Whether it’s waterfront panoramas at twilight or glittering office towers and apartment blocks by day, they cloak the action in a sense of both opulence and alienation, as Doyle fights his lone battle against the mounting odds.

But Farrell does get backup from his supporting cast. Chen radiates an aura of unearthly calm, while Alex Jennings is perfectly cast as another career gambling casualty, Adrian Lippett, a cynical user behind his thin veneer of bonhomie. Meanwhile, hot on Doyle’s heels is dogged debt collector Cynthia Blithe, played with almost sitcom-ish earthiness by Tilda Swinton. It’s a film that at first glance might feel slight, but it surreptitiously steals up on you and hits you where it hurts. 

A Private Life 

Jodie Foster (pictured right) has appeared in several French films, though her leading role in A Private Life (Vie Privée) comes 20 years after the previous one, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement. Nonetheless, her command of the French language remains poised and fluent, enlivened by the insertion of the occasional Anglo-Saxon expletive.

In Rebecca Zlotowski’s blackly-comic drama, Foster plays American psychoanalyst Lilian Steiner, who lives in a spacious apartment in one of those classic 19th-century Parisian apartment buildings. She radiates an aura of efficient professionalism and seems impervious to self-doubt, even when she’s harangued by an angry patient who says his new therapist instantly cured his smoking addiction, when his long spell of treatment with Lilian failed to do so.

However, Lilian’s seemingly comfortable routine is upended when she learns that her long-standing patient Paula (Virginia Efira) has committed suicide, which explains why she didn’t turn up for her past few sessions. Lilian is shaken when she visits Paula’s home, where the family are sitting shiva, and is angrily ordered off the premises by her husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric), who feels that Paula should have been able to avert Paula’s death.

But as the narrative develops, Lilian becomes convinced that Paula has been murdered, and she slips into amateur-sleuth mode in an attempt to winkle out the truth. This slightly farcical development does have the beneficial effect of prompting Lilian to team up with her ex-husband Gaby (a benign and whiskery Daniel Auteuil), with whom she still shares an easy-going rapport.

Interludes where Lilian herself sees a shrink, who transports her into a previous life where she and Paula played in an orchestra during the Nazi occupation, and Lilian somehow got Paula pregnant, drag proceedings bizarrely off-piste. It’s a mostly enjoyable watch, but the film itself seems to be in need of a therapist.

 Lurker 

A useful maxim for anybody who finds themselves hanging around with pop stars is “they’re the band and you’re not”. In Alex Russell’s film, Matthew (Theodore Pellerin) is working in a Los Angeles clothes shop when pop star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) walks in. Other customers in the shop start going ga-ga, demanding selfies and autographs, but Matthew doesn’t know who Oliver is (though it seems he specialises in anaemic R&B). Oliver finds this refreshing, and thinks it makes Matthew somehow trustworthy, so he invites him over to his house. The song “I’m Your Puppet” plays in the background (Lurker cast, pictured above).

Despite initial suspicions from Oliver’s bandmates, Matthew gradually inveigles his way into Oliver’s confidence, and gets himself hired to shoot a documentary and even to do the artwork for the new album. He’s invited to fly to London with Oliver, who’s doing a gig in indescribably hip Shoreditch. However, Matthew gets very jealous when his buddy from the clothes store brings some gear in for the group, and successfully lures Oliver’s attention away from him.

Long story short, true love doesn’t run smoothly, but Oliver has inadvertently aroused a violent and ruthless ambition in Matthew. He’s not going to go quietly, and he’s prepared to wreak a terrible vengeance if he doesn’t get his own way. It’s an intriguing premise, and Lurker makes some shrewd points about the imbalance between stars and star-fuckers, though it starts to run out of gas as the story develops.

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