Klokken­lu­ider review – a strong tonal bal­anc­ing act

When a famil­iar actor switch­es to direct­ing, there is the temp­ta­tion to look for par­al­lels with the films of direc­tors they’ve worked with, par­tic­u­lar­ly when there have been numer­ous col­lab­o­ra­tions. With British char­ac­ter actor favourite Neil Maskell, his debut fea­ture as writer and direc­tor active­ly invites com­par­isons to Ben Wheatley’s ear­ly work to a small extent, giv­en that Wheat­ley has an exec­u­tive pro­duc­er cred­it (Maskell is per­haps best known for his break­through lead role in Wheatley’s hit­man hor­ror Kill List).

But while Klokken­lu­ider fea­tures a sim­i­lar ten­sion to Wheatley’s films in its com­bi­na­tion of bleak com­e­dy, decep­tive­ly mun­dane set­tings and the poten­tial for knee­jerk vio­lence, Maskell’s speedy film dis­plays a dis­tinc­tive, eccen­tric voice of its own, even while bear­ing clear DNA from the likes of Harold Pin­ter plays and con­spir­a­cy thriller clas­sics. Were it not for the occa­sion­al detours to oth­er locales, it would near enough be a cham­ber piece, and it’s easy to imag­ine this mate­r­i­al being trans­ferred to the stage with some suc­cess, but a stagey feel is avoid­ed through clever edit­ing and block­ing tricks.

Onscreen text places the film’s start on the spe­cif­ic date of Feb­ru­ary 6^th 2014, in Maarkedal, East Flan­ders, Bel­gium. At a big iso­lat­ed house there, rent­ed under the cov­er sto­ry of host­ing a 40^th birth­day par­ty, a ner­vous British man (Amit Shah) and his wife (Sura Dohnke) hide under alias­es while await­ing in-per­son con­tact with a major news­pa­per jour­nal­ist who will record the details of the man’s acci­den­tal find­ings from a gov­ern­ment official’s com­put­er – the film’s title is the Dutch word for ​‘whistle­blow­er’.

Hard­ly calm­ing their nerves is the pres­ence of wan­der­ing sol­diers at near­by shops, nor the arrival of two armed close pro­tec­tion offi­cers (Tom Burke and Roger Evans) sent to guard them. This mis­matched pair of heav­ies bick­er more than the stressed mar­ried cou­ple, their rap­port pro­vid­ing much of the film’s con­fi­dent com­e­dy. Burke brings some of his droll casu­al cru­el­ty from The Sou­venir to the con­text of con­stant­ly chid­ing Evans’ some­what dim alco­holic, the lat­ter blow­ing his own alias almost immediately.

Unlike Pinter’s Godot, the jour­nal­ist does even­tu­al­ly arrive. Played by Jen­na Cole­man, she’s not what anyone’s expect­ing, not least because she’s not the estab­lished name the cou­ple were told was com­ing. Coleman’s bel­liger­ent free­lancer amus­ing­ly cites slashed print bud­gets as to why a senior staff jour­nal­ist isn’t dri­ving all the way to Bel­gium for a tip-off that might not be of any real nation­al secu­ri­ty con­cern. But more impor­tant­ly, it might not be of any use in shift­ing enough copies to sat­is­fy advertisers.

Cole­man deliv­ers her rapid-fire lines well, and the addi­tion of a con­fronta­tion­al new play­er to pro­ceed­ings is wel­come, but there’s some­thing slight­ly jar­ring in how the dia­logue so quick­ly shifts into a large­ly mono­logue-based mode. And the nature of a scene in which a stranger to the group arrives to effec­tive­ly rant about how rub­bish every­one present is while swear­ing like a sailor, plays a lit­tle like Alec Baldwin’s open­ing cameo in Glen­gar­ry Glen Ross, if it was moved from the start and placed over two thirds into the run­time instead.

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