Starring Bill Nighy, Douglas Booth, Olivia Cooke, Maria Valverde, Eddie Marsan, Daniel Mays, Sam Reid

Directed by Juan Carlos Medina

Lionsgate, out 1 September

In Victorian London’s Limehouse district, a series of brutal and bloody murders capture the public imagination. Faced with the apparently impossible task of tracking down the killer, Inspector John Kildare finds himself investigating another murder in parallel, believing the two to be linked. But can he see justice done in time?

Ostensibly a murder-mystery whodunnit styled on the Jack the Ripper murders, Limehouse Golem is actually much more. Sure, there’s gruesome murder and blood and guts, and we follow Kildare on his journey as he investigates the murders alongside the suspicious death of writer and wannabe playwright John Cree. But it’s not the chase of the Golem itself which provides the meat of the story here – instead what we are presented with is a social commentary piece on Victorian morality, as demonstrated through the appetite of the Victorian public for gruesome and lurid details of killings of similar sort to the Ripper, the treatment and station of women in Victorian society, and the treatment of those suspected to be ‘abnormal’ in some way.

It’s the characters that sell this. Bill Nighy is unexpectedly (for me) subtle in his portrayal of central protagonist Kildare. Assigned the case as a setup to failure, there’s a quiet earnestness and perfectly portrayed closed-off quality to this man who is ‘suspected not to be the marrying kind’. Nighy resists the oversell, hinting at, rather than outright displaying the internal pain and suffering of the character. His sexuality is often hinted at by others, though never discussed by himself, leaving the question open.

Opposite him is Olivia Cooke as suspected poisoner of her husband, Lizzie Cree. Cree parallels Kildare in some ways, a horrific set of experiences at the hands of older men and an abusive mother as a child leaving the adult Lizzie somewhat uninterested in sexual contact of any kind. There’s a quiet strength to the character which is reinforced as the film flashes back to various scenes in her life as told to Kildare, who suspects that her late husband may well be the Golem he seeks.

There are other suspects – three, to be precise, all known to have been in a certain place at a certain time which incriminates them all. The director has fun with this, using it as a framing device to display many of the killings over again, with the various different characters portrayed as carrying them out. The violence is often hinted at rather than explicitly shown, though there are occasional scenes which tip the other way into extremely graphic depictions, but overall it’s the hinting that tends to be the more unsettling.

The cast is rounded out by a host of excellent characters: Eddie Marsan’s ‘Uncle’ is complex and believable, but the show is really stolen by Douglas Booth as Dan Leno – the Music Hall drag star who discovers young Lizzie and takes her under his wing. Every scene Booth appears in can’t help but have him front and centre, his performance having echoes of a young Depp before the dismal tilt into parody from Jack Sparrow onwards. There’s a nervous energy about Leno which crackles off the screen without the need for wild flailing or gestures, and of all the characters, Leno remains the most enigmatic until the credits roll. I suspect big things in this young actor’s future.

Unfortunately, all this comes at the unnecessary cost of tension in the Whodunnit aspect of the movie. Indeed, the identity of the killer was obvious to me already from around the halfway mark, but towards the end the movie starts to belabour the point, inserting lines which may as well basically scream ‘Look! It’s that person there!’ with twenty-five minutes or so left until the big reveal.

It’s a shame, because had the movie been a little subtler with these late hints, and perhaps a bit more artful in certain other scenes, it could have had its cake and eaten it, being both social commentary and whodunnit mystery. Alternatively, it could (and perhaps should) have dispensed with the mystery element altogether, and had the courage to stand purely as a commentary piece. As it stands, the ‘mystery’ element detracts slightly towards the end from what is otherwise an excellent piece of genre filmmaking.

Verdict: Beautifully shot and with a set of performances which are difficult to fault, the only minor letdown is the ‘mystery’ aspect and the slightly awkward way in which it’s handled. Nevertheless, this is a movie well worth watching for any genre fan. 8/10

Greg D. Smith