Klokkenluider
Neil Maskell’s career takes a fresh turn with a black comedy that he has both written and directed.
Jenna Coleman
If you were setting out to make an English language feature film which marked your debut as writer and director, it is unlikely that you would choose to call it Klokkenluider, that being the Dutch word for whistleblower. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the actor Neil Maskell has chosen to do here. It's certainly a bold decision and arguably one so unusual that it will help to draw attention to the film’s arrival on our screens.
The tone of Klokkenluider is key to its character. The story that it tells could have been treated wholly as drama but much of the dialogue pushes it nearer to black comedy and that quickly becomes evident. It's striking too that there is no build-up to set out the circumstances that lead to the central situation. Instead, the film opens with Ewan (Amit Shah) and his Belgian wife, Silke (Sura Dohnke), already set up in a country house in Flanders which has been hired on the pretext that it is to be used for Ewan’s fortieth birthday celebrations. In reality this is a hideaway and they are there because Ewan, who had been employed by the British government for his skills in information technology, has chanced to see on screen vital secret information which has caused him to turn whistleblower. The newspaper that he has contacted is sending a journalist to this secluded spot for him to impart to her all that he knows although, fearful of the risk to his own safety, Ewan is now close to wanting to pull back. But in the meantime a team of two, Chris (Tom Burke) and Glynn (Roger Evans), have travelled from England and they turn up at the house explaining that the paper has sent them to act as protectors and bodyguards until the journalist arrives. Matters come to a head when she turns up although Flo (Jenna Coleman) proves not to be the leading reporter that had been expected but somebody who, if junior, could hardly be more forthright.
The humour in the film comes from the interplay between Chris and his less adept partner who drinks too much and lets things out, one such being his real name for this is a situation in which all four in the house have been given designated aliases. While In Bruges (2008) offers a not dissimilar blend, many critics have understandably cited Harold Pinter as providing the most apt comparison (his early one-act play The Dumb Waiter particularly comes to mind). This is all too valid and not in a good way because when dialogue emerges as being Pinteresque one almost always finds that the standards of the master are not met. That is certainly the case here even if the words spoken by these two are at the heart of the film’s humour. Albeit that the film quite lacks the American idiom found in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), that film is also evoked because it too made the humour of the language used a key component however incongruous to the drama that was playing out.
It is certainly apt in this kind of set-up that the humorous aspect should be played straight and Evans and Burke fully understand this while Jenna Coleman’s late entrance as the foul-mouthed journalist who gives no quarter helps to galvanise the film at a point when it is certainly in need of it. Shah and Dohnke also play well, but the film as a whole never really takes off. In part this is due to Maskell’s direction which finds him trying far too hard. He does create images that help to conceal the fact that the stage could easily have been the more natural home for this material but, as though too eager to prove his cinematic credentials, he emphasises wide screen close-ups and long shots in turn before adding overhead shots and the odd touch of slow motion. It all comes to seem rather too much. Even more distractingly, Maskell builds a soundtrack which, not least through the music provided by Andy Shortwave, keeps telling you that sinister forces are at work. The more that we are alerted to this by the music, the more self-conscious the piece becomes. Furthermore, by excluding any back story the film never makes us feel for Ewan and Silke’s predicament and, while the decision never to reveal exactly what secret Ewan has unearthed year is acceptable enough (it is, after all, merely the excuse for the action, what Hitchcock famously called the Macguffin), it turns out that the narrative is leading to a conclusion that most viewers will surely be expecting. Klokkenluider was never going to be an easy film to bring off and Maskell may have it in him to do better work as a writer/director especially if he learns to trust more in the tale and to avoid nudging the audience.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Amit Shah, Sura Dohnke, Tom Burke, Roger Evans, Jenna Coleman, Gracy Goldman, Sven De Ridder, Mark Austen, Benjamin Smith, Henry Hume-Kendall, Bob Broad.
Dir Neil Maskell, Pro Stephanie Aspin and Helen Simmons, Screenplay Neil Maskell, Ph Nick Gillespie, Pro Des Declan Price, Ed Jadon Rayton, Music Andy Shortwave, Costumes Lex Wood.
MarVista Entertainment/Erebus Pictures-MusicFilmNetwork.
84 mins. UK/USA. 2021. UK Rel: 1 September 2023. Cert. 15.
