Dir: Matt Harlock. With: Danny Horn, Joe Sims, Michele Moran, Hussina Raja. 80 mins. Cert: 15
Nothing to do with Ian Dury, rather a brisk, effective Brit indie thriller informed by the legend of Robert Louis Stevenson wrestling his shadow self while writing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The latter-day equivalent writer-director Matt Harlock proposes is effete BritLit posterboy Will Mercer (Danny Horn), much admired for his debut novel Random Act yet presently so mired in indecision over a follow-up it seems likely to cost him relationships, representation and reputation alike. Retreating to a friend’s Dalston garret, he’s woken by a builder, the bulletheaded, charismatic hulk Mikey (Joe Sims), who both merits and invites closer literary study. Mikey is unarguably an arresting character – a very handy golem in overalls – even if we worry which path he’s leading our guy down.
No prizes, then, for guessing which David Fincher enterprise provides another template here: Write Club might have served as an alternative, somewhat on-the-nose title. Typing to a soundtrack of his own best reviews (“the world needs to hear your story”), an emboldened Will is soon exploring grislier avenues, including home invasion and murder, while his increasingly unhinged rants to creative-writing students attract a rapt protégé headed only further into the void. Evoking a world where publishers push books with unequivocally positive pull-quotes like “confrontational” and “dangerous”, Harlock is clearly taking a red pencil to hackneyed notions of bad-boy writers: there is, he knows, only so much muscle one can wield while hunched over a laptop developing carpal tunnel syndrome.
Crucially, he matches his literary smarts with cinematic elan: suggestive use of masks and screens, a stark contrast between the blank-page sparseness of Will’s lodgings and the night he strays into, a final, symmetrical mise en abime tying everything together. (One nicely Hitchcockian touch: the string of fairylights following one victim over a balcony.) Horn nails the neophyte scribe’s tempestuous mix of bravado and insecurity, while Sims’ Mikey revels in skewering Will’s loftier pretensions, giving key scenes an energetic arsekick. A few first-feature wobbles aside – a mid-film drug trip is only partly justified by a Coleridge namedrop – we’re walking similar streets to Christopher Nolan’s microbudget breakthrough Following, this time in wittier, satirically minded company.
Blockhead opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
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