Picture Shutter Island. Now imagine what it would be like if it were filmed in shades of blue and grey instead of overripe Technicolor by a Brit with a lot of TV commercials and music videos under his belt, and influenced not by classic psychological thrillers but by Alan Moore comic books, and you’d have Franklyn, the debut film from writer/director Gerald McMorrow. The story follows four seemingly unrelated characters who exist in two seemingly separate realities. In the real world, a troubled young woman (Eva Green) keeps staging elaborate performance art pieces in her apartment, all of which culminate with her attempting suicide (but only after calling 911 first) — she’s like a drama-damaged female version of Bud Cort in Harold and Maude, using mock suicide attempts to freak out her uptight mother. We also meet a vaguely depressed young man (Control’s Sam Riley) who resorts to fantasy as a means of coping with having been jilted by his fiancée; as well as an older man (Bernard Hill) searching for his psychologically disturbed son. Then there’s the other half of the movie, which takes place in a retro-futurist version of London called “Meanwhile City” in which everybody is a religious fanatic, every other building appears to be a Gothic cathedral, and a Rorschach-like vigilante named Jonathan Preest (Ryan Phillippe) prowls the alleys in an eerily featureless mask, looking to avenge a young woman’s death at the hands of a cult leader known only as The Individual.
The Meanwhile City sequences are deeply silly, but as with Shutter Island, the silliness turns out to have a perfectly good explanation. What less forgiveable is that the scenes that take place in the real world are almost equally arch and unconvincing, written and performed with the same stifling degree of self-seriousness. Green, Riley, and Phillippe all commit themselves admirably to their roles, but the characters are too shallowly conceived to bring their commitment any emotional rewards. (Phillippe’s character is particularly irresponsible — here’s one more case of a screenwriter using “Iraq war veteran” as a shorthand explanation for delusions and randomly violent behaviour.)
On the plus side, McMorrow achieves an expensive look on what was likely a limited budget, and the mystery of how all these plot strands are possibly all going to tie together does sustain the viewer’s mild interest for the full 90-minute running time. Is it a promising debut? Yes, but only in the sense that McMorrow will probably now be a prime candidate to helm a lot of arty hitman thrillers and Underworld sequels.
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