Build My Gallows High, Farewell, My Lovely: Cold Comes the Night. The cod-profound, slightly tortured syntax of its title is in the lineage of downbeat pulp fiction Tze Chun’s film aspires to. Its strength is its delineation of a working-class world in upstate New York, where single mother Chloe (Alice Eve) manages a motel popular with prostitutes, her sleazily handsome local policeman ex- Billy (Logan Marshall-Green, pictured below right with Bryan Cranston) takes a cut of the action, and she tries to hang on to her beloved young daughter from a social worker convinced she’s being raised in an inappropriate environment.
It’s hard to argue when near-blind professional killer Topo (Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston – also, lest we forget, Malcolm in the Middle’s dad) spends the night, at the end of which his hothead driver and a prostitute have killed each other in their blood-spattered room, and the vehicle containing the money he’s ferrying to his unforgiving employers has been impounded by Billy’s cops. Which is when he decides to force Chloe to be his new driver and surrogate eyes. But Chloe, desperate for money so her daughter can escape this deadbeat world before social services drag her from it, spies an opportunity in the messy crime scene she’s stumbled into.
Pretty, posh Londoner Eve, pictured right, is convincing almost to a fault as a resolutely unglamorous, undemonstrative upstate New Yorker. Cranston, the film’s presumed selling-point in a criminal role while riding high as Breaking Bad's Walter White, is also memorable. His unremoved shades, beard and thick, monotone Polish accent are a series of masks, making Topo an enigmatic but inert villain. His revelation of a capacity for Zen super-violence despite barely being able to see is the exact point the film starts to lose the plot. But in the scenes where Chloe penetrates the professional vulnerability of this ageing career criminal trying to hide a fatal disability, Cranston drip-feeds intriguing humanity into a man whose wounded eyes remain a mystery. They have another bond. “Everybody has job, right?” are his first words to her. Both are hunting for a way out from theirs, while terrified of being laid off.
Chun’s filming of most of this in an actual Catskills motel in the wet, washed-out light of autumn also works well. But the effort to realistically present this working-class environment remains distractingly visible, from the script to Eve’s performance, instead of being, as with, say, Winter's Bone, a world you’re immersed in.
Everyone’s steady work, and the interesting set-up of a killer’s dependent relationship with a female captive as quietly smart as him, unravels at speed in the last reel. There’s a pleasurable moment when the plot jumps the rails and things aren’t as we thought, but that’s also when simmering unlikelihood becomes rampant absurdity, killing what could be an elegant ending. Chun and his writers could have learned from their anti-hero Topo’s careful cool. Instead, they lose their nerve like his driver, and make an amateurish, bloody mess.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Cold Comes the Night
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