Spall plays an eccentric architect hired to design a tomb for the the eponymous aristocrat, in writer-director Daniel Graham’s homage to Peter Greenaway
Having apprenticed in arthouse distribution, writer-director Daniel Graham has nobly devoted himself to reviving the aesthetics of once-prominent auteurs deemed unfashionable, uncommercial or both simultaneously. Graham’s 2017 film Opus Zero followed in the thematically dense, landscape-attentive footsteps of Theo Angelopoulos; this deeply eccentric follow-up tips a plumed hat to Peter Greenaway, casting Timothy Spall in what instantly resembles a post-Brexit update of 1987’s The Belly of an Architect. There’s a lot of vomit, and the film is something of a splurge itself, pebble-dashing the screen with ideas. Yet its better ones stick: whether new or regurgitated, the constituent elements are forever intriguing, even if Graham only partially pulls them together at the last.
Spall is at his most Hogarthian, making a full three-course meal out of the contradictions of architect Alfred Rott, a sharp-suited vulgarian (and self-described “intractable arsehole”) dispatched to sunkissed Malta to oversee the construction of a new concert hall. Fired after his employers clock the building’s resemblance to female genitalia, Rott’s certainties are further tested upon encountering the eponymous figure, an ailing dandy (played by Peter Stormare at his most Stormarean) who wants him to design his final resting place.