Title: London Road
Director: Rufus Norris
Starring: Olivia Colman, Anita Dobson, Tom Hardy, Rosalie Craig and Kate Fleetwood.
‘London Road’ documents the events that shook Suffolk in 2006, when the quiet rural town of Ipswich was shattered by the discovery of the bodies of five prostitutes.
But the peculiarity of Rufus Norris’ mise en scène is that the account is sung. The film is based on the National Theatre British musical mystery thriller, which in turn is based on the interviews about the Steve Wright Killings. And yet the movie does not follow the conventional musical movie structure, but characters do sing their emotions and lines almost in a messy jam, which naturally is perfectly orchestrated. Hence, this screen adaptation gives the illusion that the characters are improvising their singing. The film seems more a macabre reportage that is randomly intoned, a film oratorio.
The morbid account has the flavour of a contemporary ‘Sweeney Todd’ and stars Olivia Colman (as a forceful woman who effectively becomes the local spokesperson), and Tom Hardy (as a minicab driver who is an amateur expert on serial murders); along with Anita Dobson, Rosalie Craig and Kate Fleetwood.
The crime news pantomime uses only real dialogue spoken by people in Ipswich at the time, set to a musical score. The music by Adam Cork and remarkable dialogue and lyrics by the verbatim-theatre pioneer Alecky Blythe (based on her own interviews with the local community with media reporters and with the women who worked as prostitutes on London Road), creates a cinema piece that does not hide its stage origins, and flaunts a venturesome artificiality and theatricality. The result is an innovative form of narration to tell a moving story, of ordinary people coming together during the darkest of experiences.
Technical: A+
Acting: A
Story: B+
Overall: A-
Written by: Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi
