Out of Blue

Genre – you either take it at face val­ue and play by the rules, or get the hell out of the kitchen. Out of Blue is the lat­est fea­ture from British direc­tor Car­ol Mor­ley, her fol­low-up to 2014’s intrigu­ing but inef­fec­tive explo­ration of mass hys­te­ria, The Falling.

This one is a lacon­ic, self-con­scious­ly moody south­ern polici­er with designs on the celes­tial infi­nite. It beck­ons, per­haps unwise­ly, the swad­dling com­fort blan­ket of genre with one hand while vio­lent­ly repelling it with the oth­er. Bra­vo to the direc­tor for dou­bling down on light exper­i­men­ta­tion and once more embrac­ing an uncon­ven­tion­al sto­ry­telling mode, but it’s hard to sug­ar coat the fact that the result­ing film is an ugly, per­plex­ing catastrophe.

The usu­al­ly reli­able Patri­cia Clark­son is mis­cast as insu­lar Detec­tive Mike Hooli­han. She strug­gles to find an emo­tion­al foothold in a depres­sive, appar­ent­ly bril­liant lon­er whose tem­pera­ment alters rad­i­cal­ly (and ran­dom­ly) from scene to scene. The body of rock­a­bil­ly astro­physi­cist Jen­nifer Rock­well (Mamie Gum­mer) is found next to a tele­scope, and Hooli­han sets about cas­ing out the var­i­ous creeps and carousers in the dead girl’s life.

The essen­tial mys­tery of who­dunit becomes a dull excuse for char­ac­ters to engage in drea­ry, humour­less philo­soph­i­cal dis­course. Schrödinger’s cat is evoked every five min­utes in a cheap attempt to bol­ster the film’s intel­lec­tu­al bonafides. The twist of hav­ing hav­ing a woman play the reg­u­la­tion griz­zled male pro­tag­o­nist from clas­si­cal noir comes across as a weak gim­mick, par­tic­u­lar­ly in an entire­ly super­flu­ous sequence where Clark­son swag­ger­ers uncom­fort­ably around a top­less bar.

It’s nev­er a good sign when you’re watch­ing a movie and the only thought in your head is, ​‘How on earth did this get the green light?’, but such is the case with Out of Blue. If there’s a glim­mer of hope, it’s that this might not be the worst Mar­tin Amis adap­ta­tion of recent times – that dubi­ous hon­our goes to the exe­crable Lon­don Fields. Yet the race to the bot­tom is way too close for comfort.