London, 1934. The Daily Chronicle’s acid tongued theatre critic torments a popular but cripplingly insecure actress via a sequence of cheerfully vitriolic reviews. He is Ian McKellen, she is Gemma Arterton. Together, they elevate an otherwise middling effort from Leap Year director Anand Tucker. They, and a clutch of tremendously catty barbs in a script from Patrick Marber, making his long overdue return to cinema. Where The Critic boasts strength in the line, however, the wider whole hasn’t half the zest and flavour.
A knot loops itself into formation early on in Speak No Evil, James Watkins’ Devon set remake of the 2022 Danish original by Christian Tafdrup. It’s a simple tie, a mere clove hitch, and hidden beneath a veil of geniality. Sure enough, the film’s first thirty minutes or so are genuinely very funny. Knowing, witty and surprisingly scatological. And yet, as things progress, as the peril rises and hints of shade give way to a staggering pit of darkness, the knot tightens. All too late, it’s got you. The loop opens up and in you fall. It’s no longer a clove hitch. It’s a hangman’s knot.
They don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Did they ever? If convention dictates that the average movie ought to follow at least some form of logical progression, the answer can only be no. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – the rather marvellously titled follow up to 1988’s original ‘juice – is as zany an offering as anything in the Tim Burton catalogue to date, and all the better for it. All the better and, in a great many number of ways, the worse. Certainly, there’s nothing here to ingratiate newcomers nor win over the original skeptics. Put simply, Beetlejuice doubled is just as puerile, unfocused and weird as its forebear, and no less reliant on the talents of its gloriously gothic cast ensemble to tether its grounding.
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