Colm Meaney leads a compelling trio of actors but but this talky drama labours under the weight of a plodding script
Show, don’t tell. It’s one of cinema’s cardinal rules – not that anyone told Colm Meaney’s compulsively questioning priest in David Beton’s laborious thriller, or the wounded
Gunman (True Blood’s Stephen Moyer) who staggers into his church with a yarn to spin. You have to be very gifted to successfully flout that rule, and writer-director Beton – also responsible for 2017’s The Hatton Garden
Job, under the name Ronnie Thompson – can’t get his characters to transfix, even if they keep interest flickering intermittently.
Meaney’s Father Peter is admirably stoic with a gun in his face. In fact, he soon turns the tables on the interloper, Victor, who he implores to own up to whatever sins have led to him bleeding from the stomach in the nave. But while Victor recounts his saga – something about his dead wife and his estrangement from his teenage daughter – another bleeding intruder, Willow (Clare-Hope Ashitey, little seen since Children of Men), is lurking in a wardrobe in Father Peter’s study. When she finally emerges, brandishing a
police badge, she upends everything Victor has been saying.