The veteran pair duel hypnotically in a mystery thriller whose occasional silliness is masked by storytelling gusto
This mystery thriller is outrageous and irresistible, an old-fashioned drama with dashes of Patricia Highsmith, Patrick Hamilton, John le Carré and maybe Elizabeth Jane Howard’s memoir Slipstream. It features delicious performances by Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen – I don’t think McKellen has had such a juicy role since his turn in the 1998 drama Apt Pupil – and the film has such storytelling gusto that you’ll overlook bits of implausible silliness involving smartphone-type “handsets” with which large financial sums can supposedly be transferred from one bank account to another.
The director is Bill Condon, and it’s adapted by screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher from the bestselling 2016 novel by first-time author Nicholas Searle who caused a flurry of his own by announcing that he was “not allowed to say more about his career than that he was a senior civil servant for many years”.