The story goes that Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon wrote The Christophers for Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel without having any idea if they’d do it or not. According to the IMDb trivia on this film, Soderbergh and Solomon didn’t even know McKellen and Coel, which is plausible in Coel’s case – she’s only been around a relatively short time – but surely not in McKellen’s.
It’s the sort of film that Soderbergh knocks out between big projects. For every Ocean’s 13 a Kimi, for every Magic Mike a Presence – that is to say: tiny cast and crew, controlled location, films that could almost be stage plays.
Here, McKellen is a fruity old artist getting towards the end of his life and Coel is the forger hired by his grasping children to relieve the aged artist of “The Christophers”, a series of paintings that Julian Sklar made decades before. Sklar has vowed that the paintings will never see the light of day and because of this they have developed quite a reputation – easily eclipsing his own, which tanked decades ago. What Coel’s Lori Butler is meant to do depends on the state she finds the pictures in – steal and copy them and then put them back, or finish them maybe. It’s even possible Sklar has destroyed them. Whatever turns out to have happened to them, his kids’ intention is that they have something valuable they can pass off as Sklar’s once he’s gone, since their relationship with their father is non-existent and they’re certain he’s going to bounce them.
So into the artist’s house/studio Butler sails, posing as someone answering an advert for an assistant. And here is where the jousting, the cat and mousing, begins.
What’s fascinating structurally is that McKellen is playing both the target of what is a strange sort of heist. But he also becomes the detective on the case, once he gets winds of the fact that Butler trained as an artist. An adept at the online world – illuminated by ringlight, he sells video greetings to fans – he starts digging and is astonished at what he finds. Will he confront her with his discoveries?
As the powerplay becomes tidal, wherever this looked like it was going, it suddenly isn’t. Solomon and Soderbergh start handbrake-turning the plot very early on, and keep doing it, sending it screeching off in a different direction each time. I’ll not say any more, but the way I expected this to go isn’t the way it went.
McKellen has been offered a licence to ham it up, and seized it with both hands. Sklar is a broken down old fraud still standing on his dignity and McKellen’s fluting, national-treasure performance makes him tragic and funny, the comic relief to Coel’s more earnest, stakes-driven Butler – he’s the chorus, she’s the soloist, though he notably gets the comedy and the profundity. Coel could just stand there and do nothing, so astonishing are her features, but they really suit her to the role – she’s a gazelle caught in the full beam of this old artist’s self regard.
Soderbergh shoots it all in a handful of rooms supposedly in Sklar’s London townhouse, on handheld cam, following Coel and McKellen upstairs and down (McK is 86 here and is up and down like the proverbial bride’s nightie) as she thrusts and he parries.
At the heart of it disquisitions on the importance of art, the fugitive nature of creativity and the place of authorship and authenticity in the world of art.
It’s not unlike Sleuth in many ways – older and younger party, each using what they have to gain the upper hand. And like Sleuth (the Oliver/Caine original not the remake) the exquisite performances pull us gently towards a rather elegiac finish. A very different kind of heist thriller.
The Christophers – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
