All sorts of klaxons are sounding, red lights flashing and warning bells ringing at the beginning of Magpie, a neo-noir which, by the end, has triumphed in telling a story which Roald Dahl (wearing his adult hat) might be proud to call one of his own.
It’s a screenplay written by an actor and it’s his first one – two amber signals right there. What’s more writer Tom Bateman is the husband of the film’s star, Daisy Ridley. And the story is “based on an original idea by Daisy Ridley”. There are are so many potential bear traps there that trepidation is understandable.
And yet. A small, dark, exquisitely formed thriller-ish story is what these two have produced, helped along by director Sam Yates, with some superb performances sending us off in one direction when in fact the real action is going on elsewhere.
Ridley plays Annette, the stay-at-home mother with a bolshy, domineering husband, Ben (Shazad Latif), and a couple of children. One of them is a child actor and, in a neat flip cutting against the pushy mother stereotype, it is Ben who’s keenest to further the career of little Matilda (Hiba Ahmed).
Ben is in fact keen on lots of things, most of them involving keeping Annette in her box, while he pursues his dream of being a writer, though that’s not going so well, hence, possibly, his desire to push his daughter into the limelight.
Annette also has dreams, as we see in a very neatly played early scene in which she meets up with her old boss and tries to ask for her old job in publishing back, but can’t quite rise to the occasion, which seems to suit former boss Richard (Alistair Petrie particularly good here) just fine.
Background detail painted in broad strokes, the story itself gets going when Matilda gets a job on a period drama and Ben takes her to the set on day one and meets the actor who is going to play her mother, Alicia (Matilda Lutz), a woman whose sex tape is currently doing the rounds on the internet.
Circumstances throw Ben and Alicia together on this first day, something clicks, and soon they are flirting by text. Having sung Alicia a version of the “my wife doesn’t understand me” song, Ben cannot believe his luck to have got a taker, and a live one at that. At home the increasingly suspicious Annette may have come off the meds she’s taking for a wobbly and never specified nervous condition. Surely once Alicia is referring to Annette as a “witch” the bedroom cannot be far away.
It’s all done as songs in the key of noir – dark shadows, massively underlit rooms and characterisation that leans towards the static – Ben is an angry man, Alicia is a voracious babe, Annette is a madwoman.
It’s so low-key that at times it threatens to grind to a halt, but then we hit the final third and the neatness of Bateman’s screenplay, Yates’s simple but telling direction and the careful performances suddenly all come together.
There’s a twist, in other words. More than one, in which the domineering bully, the stay-at-home mother and the vixen actress are all put through several wash and spin cycles. It helps that the cast is so good. Ridley is an ace at facial micro-gestures, Latif can bring on the menace in an instant, and Lutz, though she has less to do, is very good at misdirection, while Ahmed, as young Matilda (that name, surely, is a nod to Dahl?), also has her moments.
Tales of the Unexpected, they used to call these in the 1980s, when a TV series of that name would deliver Roald Dahl (or similar) stories about weird goings-on, often in suburbia, to British audiences in peak time. It ran for nine years, before it had worn itself out after 102 episodes. Bateman and Ridley are apparently working on another two movie ideas. Will there be more Dahl-esque ta-daahs?
Magpie – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
