There are other kinds of violence

This is a review of Calvary (2014)

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13 April (the day on which Samuel Beckettt claimed to be born, which was also Good Friday that year...)

This is a review of Calvary (2014)

In two parts, which deliberately balance, these words from Saint Augustine appear on the screen at the beginning of Calvary (2014) (Irish writer Samuel Beckettt clearly refers to these words from St Augustine (from his Confessions*) in Waiting for Godot**) :

Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved.
Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.


John Michael McDonagh’s careful, challenging film*** is a meditation, which loses us as to time (despite the fact that the days of the week count down), but roots us in space – almost in the way that The American (Tom Berenger) causes ‘Bull’ McCabe (Richard Harris) to fixate upon the piece of land that gives The Field (1990) its title (a film in which Gleeson appears). Brendan Gleeson, as Father James, seems to live more, which is arguably also on a symbolic level, in the week in which we are with him than the running-time suggests is possible, just as The Field painfully evokes an eternal struggle in a small compass.

At @CamPicturehouse, @CalvaryFilm is Tremendous piece of work !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

Subtly, but in every scene (or group of scenes, or the principal scene for the day of the week), there is a base colour – almost as if signifying the Biblical rainbow that the Book of Genesis tells us was established as a covenant between Man and God (9 : 13 (to prevent a further flood and another Noah)), and possibly chiming with Stockhausen’s colour-scaped composition Licht, comprising an opera for each day of the week.

Thus, the tinges in Fr. James’ beard foreshadow his daughter’s hair, and, when she comes into his room and his dog Bruno is lying on the bed and he is reading on a chair next to her, the camera catches her face, the light from the window on her left cheek, and the beauty of her hair. The pattern of coloration, however it turns out to work on a re-viewing, is there, and indicates McDonagh’s underlying thoughts have engaged with the full resonance of his chosen theme, a circumscribed passage of time.

Calvary (2014) rejoices in its colours - copper, red, grey, blue, to name but a few, and is a wonderful script that Brendan Gleeson embodies
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

Much else in the film, in other ways, is unspoken (or present in an unvoiced way), and much requires reflection. For example, Fr. James had been married, and his wife, the mother of Fiona (Kelly Reilly), whom he meets from the station, had died what sounds an agonizing death (but there is no more to tell us about her, other than an exchange between Fiona and her father). On Tuesday (maybe Monday) Fiona arrives by train (perhaps by prior arrangement, perhaps because of what has just happened to her), and we gradually infer – confirmed by what is said in the pub to those who do not know who Fiona – who she is in relation to him :

At the moment of his meeting her, the connection is suitably opaque, and we momentarily wonder. We wonder, in part, because of how Gleeson, in the police in The Guard (2011), chooses to spend his day off, and how he balances duty and personal life – a theme that recurs here. As to what is happening to Fr. James in this time that we are with him, the only person who knows that anything is amiss is his Bishop (David McSavage) (from what Fr. James says to him).

The Bishop counsels, but seems greatly to respect Fr. James, and does not intervene, does not require him to do certain things, even when something dramatic happens – their exchange of thoughts and views is full and frank, and Gleeson plays another character who commands respect, as his Sergeant Boyle did from FBI Agent Wendell (Don Cheadle) in The Guard. As James is, Boyle is an educated man, although they wear their knowledge differently and to different effect – Boyle does not accord with the expectations of the local force, and makes a rare link with Wendell, whereas, in Calvary there is a barrage of sophistry and posture, as if to shake James out of his faith, and he uses his intelligence as a resource (much as his character Ken, with his appreciation of art and culture, does in In Bruges (2008), not as the inconvenient piece of integrity that it can be to Boyle.

Though not exhaustively or exclusively, Fr. James takes kinds of escape from reality on both Friday, and Saturday. He well knows what he might have to do or face, but he has had a week of others who say that they do not want things that he can see that they do, and vice versa, and they have begun to take their toll on him. In this and other respects, this film has obvious echoes with Bergman’s famous The Seventh Seal (1957) (and, in this film, we even see the outcome of a gentlemanly game of chess between two men who might have reason to be at odds). As in that classic, too, time is a dimension, and the question of how one best judge what requires one’s attention.

The close of Calvary (2014) had @THEAGENTAPSLEY in tears - what a beautiful film, thoughtfully scripted, and made with everyone's care !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

Yet, in a sense (though this earlier film by no means precisely maps onto it), Calvary is also an inverted D.O.A. (1950) (with Edmond O’Brien (as Frank Bigelow), and re-made in a version with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan in 1988), but with Gleeson in some sort of driving-seat, though not in full command of where the vehicle will go…

Anyone watching Calvary (2014) should wait till the end of the credits : there are stills and footage embedded in them...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

Gleeson is a whirlwind of pastoral roles in this film, and one cannot conceive anyone else bringing off the part, supported admirably by Kelly Reilly, Dylan Moran, Orla O’Rourke, Isaach de Bankolé, M. Emmet Walsh, and Chris O’Dowd, to name but a few, and with highly sympathetic contributions from Patrick Cassidy’s score and Larry Smith’s cinematography.


End-notes


* According to Deirdre Bair, who was Beckettt’s first biographer (Samuel Beckettt : A Biography, Jonathan Cape, London, 1978)), ‘The image first took on meaning for Beckettt as early as 1935, when he read St. Augustine’s Confessions, and began to use the expression to define either / or situations. It appears repeatedly in his correspondence [Bair cites the following correspondents in her note (p. 692) : George Reavey, Arland Ussher, Mary Manning Howe, and Thomas McGreevy] from that time onward […] (p. 386)’.


** Against Estragon’s twice saying ‘No’ when asked if he would like to hear, but justified to him by Vladimir on the basis that ‘It’ll pass the time’, Vladimir tells Estragon about the varying accounts of crucifixion (Waiting for Godot, Faber & Faber, London, 1965, pp. 12 – 13). Just before, when Estragon had been examining his hat and his feet, and not listening to him (p. 11), he said these words, on which he elaborates :

One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It’s a reasonable percentage.

There is at least one other Beckettt reference in Calvary, when the woman over whose husband Father James has earlier said the last rites, sees him again at the airport, and she fleetingly employs the closing words of his novel The Unnamable : I can’t go on I’ll go on.


*** McDonagh wrote and directed it, as he did The Guard (2011), in which Gleeson also stars.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Going for the double

This is a review of The Double (2013)

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5 April

This is a review of The Double (2013)

Anyone who is familiar with the trailer for The Double (2013) (though we should know that trailers are not made by the film-makers) is not going to expect Dostoyevsky’s novella to be any more than a jumping-off point for the film (as Thurber’s story is for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)), but what the trailer does do is to suggest misleadingly* that the latter is also a benign, and less dark, study in the nature of inadequacy.

Particularly at the start (before we meet Simon James’ double), it feels as though co-writers Richard Ayoade (who also directs) and Avi Korine (from that family whose members brought you, amongst other things, Spring Breakers (2012)) have ‘mashed up’ sources such as those that follow (although that feeling of making reference, or borrowing, does dissipate somewhat over time, as the propulsive nature of the telling takes over (please see below)) :

* Gogol’s story ‘The Overcoat’ (some see Dostoyevsky’s work, four years later, as a rebuttal of Gogol’s works)

* Yury Tynyanov’s Lieutenant Kijé (as popularized in Western Europe by Prokofiev’s Suite, Op. 60, distilled from his film-music)

* Brazil (1985)

* Rear Window (1954)

* Elements of Lynch (not least the feel, look, and sound of the world of Eraserhead (1977))

* Even The Apartment (1960)


Without saying more, one will see – unless one guesses – what aspects of the film correspond with the earlier material to make this disturbing whole, driven along by the Glass-like rapid string arpeggios of Andrew Hewitt’s score, or the low-frequency rumbling that makes the corridors seem so unnerving …


And that apart from other disturbances in James’ life of the kind given by Sally Hawkins in a nice authoritarian cameo, let alone the increasingly hostile security guard (IMDb puzzlingly says that it is ‘rumored’ that this was Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s role), or the grumpy service in James’ local café (asked why he comes back here, he says that he is ‘loyal’ – and one cannot conceive of James doing anything very domestic in his flat, with utensils that look to be of grandmaternal origin).

In an early scene, in an underground train equally devoid of comfort (or a sense of the common good), we imagine that it must be a nightmare of the type in 8½ (1963), or a parody of one – James is, in what is established here, seen to be so labile that we have to hope hard that he can show himself as in the Mitty film, and maybe wonder whether he is more in the vein of Ronnie Corbett’s Timothy Lumsden in Sorry !.

In this film, partly because we are influenced to identify with Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), partly because we look for an emergence into real life of The Replicator** (in the form of Paddy Considine), which James says is his favourite t.v. programme, we invest a hope in what might happen. We believe that Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) might respond to James (whose interest in her is reminiscent of that of Josef K. in Fraülein Bürstner in Kafka's The Trial ?), if he knew the right thing to do, and we believe in the notion from Roxanne (1987) (and its more illustrious antecedents) that he might he helped to, and for, his own good.

It might have been fun if Wasikwoska had doubled the part of Melanie, played by Yasmin Paige, to mimic Eisenberg’s duality : as it is, we are offered an insight into her character’s fragility, which has been exploited by a knowledge of that of James, and we see her torn, although not in a way that is not unusual in cinema (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) ?), between what attracts everyone else and the likelihood (which, with Marilyn’s Lorelei, fatally attracts, or at least fails to repel) of getting hurt.

Of course, the theme of betrayal by a seeming friend is an age-old one, pre-dating Judas, and which has resonated ever since, in, for example, the tables being turned on K. in Kafka’s The Castle by his assistants (themselves a form of substitute). Here, far more was possible with the topic of identity theft than the film encompasses, and it prefers to stay within the general bounds of what is a person and what about a person is perceived to make him or her worthwhile.

In the end, subverting the messages of James’ powerlessness (as we provisionally thought that it had to), it offers the sort of Pyrrhic victory*** that we know, for Ray, from In Bruges (2008). It is not unlike many other endings (e.g. from episodes of Star Trek (original series only, please) or Dr Who, amongst others), and so concludes the piece, nowhere near Dostoyevsky (unless we make some massive inferences), because there had to be some ultimate resolution.

That said, principals Wasikowska and Eisenberg are both excellent, and the film is not without an effect from how it contrasts the homeliness and colour of her flat with that of his, as well as from Hewitt’s score, and the levels of tension that it gives to this cheerless universe.



End-notes

* NB Contains a spoiler As does IMDb : A comedy centered on a man who is driven insane by the appearance of his doppleganger (sic).


** Shades of The Reprisalizer from Matthew Holness’ A Gun for George (2011) ?

Here, the t.v. series is a sort of Orwellian distraction from the predominant greyness of life in this place and time, though it is less clear that it is a degraded world of the kind that Gilliam’s referenced film gives us, or a reimagined instance of the early computer age a parallel for the world of the pre-Soviet government department.

The real Replicator in the film is Hannah (probably in more senses than one), because she is a junior member of the copying department, operating what some might describe as a steam-punk take-off of the large and clunky Xerox® machines from the late 1970s : James and she are amongst the few of an age in this organization. Her boss tells James that any sensible person would want two copies (which proves to be astute, although James does not want another he), not just the one that, as a pretext for being there, he keeps coming up and asking for.


*** You could even posit a reference to the scene with the Patronus across the lake in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)…


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Fuckin' Bruges further

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28 July

Having now watched the extras from the In Bruges (2008) DVD, including the one that almost makes a sort of rap by stringing together every shit-hole, fuck, fucking and cunt, I add a few further comments to my review :

* We learn that Martin McDonagh has parcelled out the two sides of his reaction to Bruges when he spent a weekend there - Ken is the part impressed by the sights and sounds, Ray the one that just wants to get away from it all and have a beer*

* McDonagh had also been quite careful that Bruges, as I found, should be another character, and, with the city's co-operation after he had selected all the views that he wanted to include, had access to all but one

* The scene atop the belfry was shot in a mock-up, reimagining how it would have been before safety-mesh and the like had been installed

* There is confirmation for the idea that the city may be a sort of Purgatory for Ray, or, at any rate, that his negative feelings about himself and what he has done mean that he cannot enter into its and Ken's desire for him to appreciate it

* In one of the extended scenes, Ray likens the balance that Ken talks of between culture and fun to a retarded black girl (culture) outbalancing a dwarf (fun) on a seesaw, and then goes on to say how he was beaten up by a black girl as a child

* The deleted scenes show that there was scope for far more references to boys and toys that did not make the cut, and justly so (although I am not sure how good it is to have these materials presented to us with the finished film)

* Other scenes suggested Ray's emotional vulnerability more strongly : he also supposes that the priest must have had it coming as a paedophile, but it is disabused that he was supporting a campaign against a housing development in which Harry has an interest

* An extended sequence with Chloe, when she jumps up, wraps her legs around Ray, and, when he says that he wants a drink, says that they should have a fuck, shows tenderness (although the scene in bed is clearly interrupted by memory affecting performance)

* It is unclear where these scenes, relating to Harry's personnel (or their foe), fit in, but we are graphically presented with a police detective being decapitated


End-notes

* Bill Bryson reports that reaction to Brussels in his travel book Neither Here, Nor There, and he is not far wrong.


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Fuckin' Bruges

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20 January

* Contains spoilers *

I don’t know whether In Bruges (2008) made the city even more attractive to tourists, but it was so well shot by Eigil Bryld – even the set-pieces from the typical guide-book – that it should have done.

For this was certainly not a film that did as that year’s Woody Allen’s Barcelona-titled work (as it had funding to be filmed in that city¹) and just treated us to a picture-show (however nicely), but one that embedded Bruges in the development of the film right from the opening to the closing shots (as Allen’s Paris- and Rome-centred films then did three and four years later, although it may be fanciful, just by virtue of the comparison, to suggest that Allen learnt from what Martin McDonagh’s picture does).

I did not see the film when it was released, but was aware of it at the time of Brendan Gleeson’s excellent performance in The Guard (2011), and then at the recent run of Seven Psychopaths (2012), in the light of finding which dire a friend lent me his DVD, so I know why people expected better from McDonagh writing / directing again.

In truth, though, what seemed like an under-par performance from common link Colin Farrell (as Ray) threatened to have me stop watching (either because it was too close to the use to which he was put in Psychopaths, or, perhaps, because I had thought more of him in another Allen film, Cassandra’s Dream (2007)), which makes it less implausible that Allen had seen this other Farrell film. I am glad that I did not quit, because, around the time that Ken (Gleeson) goes to see Yuri to get a gun, the film picked up for me.

Until then, possibly because I like the place, I had been rather irritated by Ray’s opening condemnation of Bruges as a shit-hole, his refusal to join in with Ken’s spirit of making the best of being sent there, including a smart-arsed comparison with Dublin, and even by his baiting some overweight Americans into chasing him : most of those things came back to haunt, as does the accidental killing that has led Ken to bring Ray to Bruges, and make the ending powerfully effective. Yes, the final theme does owe something to the t.v. series Life on Mars (2006 – 2007), and maybe even to the feeling of The Truman Show (1998), but I did not see it coming.

Early on, there had been palpable references to the exchanges between Gogo and Didi from Beckettt’s Waiting for Godot, to the situation in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter** (and, for good measure, to Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, as Ken is flustered and cannot remember which of the two aliases used is his), and I wrongly wondered how original the writing was going to be, before realizing that they were probably passing mentions (almost inevitable in a work with buddies).

Equally fleeting appeared the echoes of Dante in the theological chat, both in front of the Hieronymous Bosch painting The Last Judgement², of which we are shown details from the centre panel, at the art gallery, and on the bench afterwards. (Giving a message to Death, anatomy lessons involving human dissection, and gruesome, if miraculous, saints’ lives had all preceded the Bosch scenes, and pricked Ray’s sensibility (and conscience ?).)

Stepping back a bit, the film opens with these words, narrated over night-time shots by an unseen Ray :

After I killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames, washed the residue off my hands in the bathroom of a Burger King, and walked home to await instructions. Shortly thereafter, the instructions came through: Get the fuck out of London, you’s dumb fucks – get to Bruges ! [quotation truncated]


However, we may not have fully caught these words, and, because of hearing the voice saying that he did not know where Bruges was (and so momentarily feeling superior ?), may not later spot a mismatch. This occurs when a boy with adults, whom Ray sees walking across a square, gives rise to a flashback, at the end of which Ray is dragged (seemingly by Ken) from the scene where a priest and a boy lie dead (re-enter Pinter ?).

At the end, as Ray is being put on a stretcher, and, from Ray’s point of view, we see an oxygen-mask being lowered (shades of John Simm as Sam Tyler, and Beckettt’s doubt-filled trilogy ?), we hear him narrate again, as the stretcher slides inside an ambulance :

[…] And I thought, if I survive all this, I’ll go to that house, apologize to the mother there, and accept whatever punishment she chose for me. Prison, death – it didn’t matter. Cos, at least in prison, and at least in death, you know, I wouldn’t be in fuckin’ Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me, and I realized. Fuck, man - maybe that’s what Hell is : the entire rest of eternity spent in fuckin’ Bruges ! And I really really hoped I wouldn’t die. I really really hoped I wouldn’t die…


We have followed Ken and Ray thus far, latterly with their boss Harry Waters (another stunning role for Ralph Fiennes, that champion scene-stealer), as the triangle has been brought together by principle, betrayal, disobedience and sacrifice, centring in Bruges (words that unforcedly ring through the screenplay). Harry, who had professed a boyhood wonder for the place when he speaks to Ken, stalks through it, so fixed on his quarry that he scarcely seems to see it and its Christmas magic, which we, too, then feel less with the tense - turning to pounding and grinding - music of the chase, reminiscent of that of The Matrix (1999).

Both Ken and Ray still have life in them when, by rights (though I do not have the knowledge of the Flemish anatomists shown earlier) one might have thought that they should be dead. It is Ken’s bid to save Ray (just as it was when Ken, about to kill, stopped Ray shooting himself and put him on a train) that elevates matters above one killer (Ken himself) and whether he kills or is killed by another killer (Harry), although we are not really drawn to take sides (but cannot take the extreme behaviour of the ticket-seller of the belfry as reason for what Harry does in reprisal – one for McDonagh’s later tally of psychopaths !). (Stoppardian logic with the scene atop the belfry.)

Unknown to Ray, Harry has apparently wanted him to enjoy Bruges before being executed, but, from first to last, excepting that Chloe lives there (and, even so, he has to insult the city on their date), he never gives it a chance, whereas Ken has been soaking in the sights and experiences. Are there subterranean glimpses, here, of a meaning beyond the superficial, that Ken may be a Clarence to Ray’s George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)) – after all, there is Ray’s attempt on his own life, from which Ken, appointed to kill him, saved him (more Stoppardian logic), and, for example, when Ken encourages Ray to look at something during their canal-boat trip, he is hunched in his coat and does not even raise his head ?

Is Ken actually real, or no more so to anyone else than, say, Charles is to John Nash (A Beautiful Mind (2001), or Harvey to Elwood (Harvey (1950), although Harvey is, in fact, visible to others), because, of course, Ray is narrating the story and we only see what he envisages ? Enough in this film, I think, to give us pause whether Ray, like Sam Tyler, may be talking to us and / or himself from a coma, because of the horrific injuries from Harry’s dum-dum bullets (we have seen what one did to the head of Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), dressed as a schoolboy). If Ken is Ray's guide, is he a sort of Virgil to Ray's Dante ?

At the end of the film, the location of the film that is being made⁴ (on which Ray met Chloe) is peopled by some Bosch-like creatures, one of whom knocks Ray to the ground with his beak, and, somehow, Marie from the hotel is there, as well as Chloe (so even a bit of a feel of The Game (1997) or maybe 8½ (1963)).

When, after Chloe and Ray kissed (during which we saw Harry, intend on business with Ken, walk straight past, and Chloe said, of herself, ‘The most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in all of your stupid life’ as a reason for what Ray has to stay for), they took a romantic drink together. When Jimmy came over, he said about his character and that night’s shoot that ‘the psycho-dork turns out to be some loveable schoolboy and it’s all some Boschian nightmare’.

Stephen, in Joyce’s Ulysses, says the much-quoted words History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. In this film (with Ray’s past of an accidental shot that killed a praying boy, whose prayers, clutched in his hand, Ray reads), Ray says of history, as a retort to Ken’s interest in it – just before, at the hotel, Ken was reading The Death of Capone – I used to hate history, didn’t you ? It’s all just a load of stuff that’s already happened !, and immediately rushes off, because there are ‘midgets being filmed’.

At that moment, Ray isn’t trying to awake from history, but avoid it, by chatting up (the willing) Chloe, and hearing about the dream-sequence that is being filmed, which, she tells him, is neither a pastiche of, nor an homage to, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), but an overhead : the belfry and all the buildings do not interest him, but Chloe and Jimmy and the film do, and he is drawn to them.

He almost so wants to be part of the film-world that it is no surprise that he ends up on location again in the finale. Chloe had talked about site security, and Ray says that he evaded it, but there is certainly no evidence of any now. Does Ray have a little feel about him of Bill Harford from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (taken from a short story by Schnitzler) ?

However we interpret this film, there are a couple of constants – Ray’s lively, beetling brows (into which Farrell channels much of his acting), and his decorative shirt, which would seem to be the only one that he has (despite the fact that Ken and he are both shouldering bags when they arrive in the city). There are some shots where one can get a closer view of this shirt, and realize that what decorates it, which I took for music for a long time (trying to confirm which detracted from the action and drew attention to what seemed Farrell’s apparent one-dimensionality), is something else.

It cannot really be made out, but could resemble wild-card characters from an ASCII set together with a paper-trace-type pattern (when programs and data were fed in on paper-tape), or, put another way, the ones accessed from a font such as Symbol. Is that it ? Is Ray’s shirt a symbol – is it, as with the letters and numbers that, if one can see them, make up the world of The Matrix, an indication that he is – whether because he is really in a coma or in Hell (or Purgatory) – a piece of source-code amongst all this imagined reality, where Marie, Eirik, and Chloe are all somehow there to see his wounded body carried away ?


Post-script

Whatever Ray may say about Bruges, acting as a dismissive gobshite, when Ken alludes to what has brought him there, he is figuratively on his knees, as he is in front of the vivid depictions in The Groeninge Museum. Although, as dinner with Chloe shows, he is capable of violence in defence of that image, it does not seem to be his inner nature, which is to be fascinated by Jimmy (because he is 'a midget' - a childish state of wonder), to talk blarney to Chloe, to be reduced to the fear and trembling of a schoolboy facing his doom.

As Ray lies wounded, probably likely to die, and is thinking, these parts of him combine in deriving an eschatology where being in Hell equates to being in Bruges : the part of him that hopes, though founded on this extreme aversion, does not want to die and end up there eternally, but, with his wounds, living will necessarily be at the cost of being there for quite a while. If, that is, the whole foregoing has not been confused by his near-death state and he has confused and deluded himself...


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End-notes

¹ For a screenplay apparently originally set in LA.

² The play is a big clue as to what instructions can eventually be expected. (The likeness to Father Ted, where Ken is an amalgam of Ted and Dougal, and Ray a more benign Jack, is less helpful.)

³ The work is a triptych, with the other two panels painted on the inside of doors that are hinged to meet in the middle, which, I gather, was a common method at the time for keeping the main painting concealed and protected when not required for devotional purposes.

Unusually for films, the work is where it is said to be, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, although the opening sequence had, which is why I have checked, made me wonder whether all the gargoyles, statues, moons and the like had been shot on location (as well as whether the topography is fairly represented in the depiction of the scenes).


⁴ Psychopaths tries to repeat this, and other elements of Bruges (e.g. the Harry Waters character is mirrored by Charlie Brooker), with a film within a film, but it just doesn’t work.


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