Little Things, The

The Little Things belongs in the very crowded category of murder thriller and more specifically the serial killer thriller but writer/director John Lee Hancock rings enough changes to ensure that it is not more of the same.

Denzel Washington plays Joe “Deke” Deacon a former star LAPD detective who, for reasons unexplained, has been sent to Coventry, which in his case is, Bakersfield, a couple of hours drive from L.A. He is back in town to pick up some evidence. While he’s there he meets his replacement, Jim Baxter (Rami Malek), who is working on a serial killer case. Deke recognizes similarities with the case he was working on that cost him his marriage and three heart attacks led him to being demoted to deputy sheriff. The two men agree to work together and gradually they close in on their target, a long-haired creep, Albert Sparma (Jared Leto).

With its sombre, neo-noir cinematography by John Schwartzman and eerie score by Thomas Newman creating a persuasive vehicle for its disturbing scenario one can’t help but be reminded of David Fincher’s 1995 mega-hit Se7en  which also had two detectives, one black, one white (Malek is of Egyptian descent but the character, Jim Baxter, was presumably conceived as white) one older, one younger, the former mentor to the latter, as they pursue a cunning serial killer.  Although Hancock claims to have written the screenplay in 1993, two years before the release of Fincher's film the similarities are so extensive it is hard to believe that it is simply coincidence.

Whilst some will see The Little Things as Se7en-Lite and it is true that it doesn't have the tight plotting and claustrophobic slickness of Fincher's film, or despite a couple of visits to a crime scene early in the film, the same degree of graphic grislyness, Hancock is much less concerned with amping up genre expectations than he is with the mental and emotional condition of his three protagonists.

As the stoically-haunted, Deke, Washington is in his element, his shoulders bent as if with the weight of the past (we do eventually find out what this is about), constantly watching for the little things which reveal the truth. Malek, with his pronounced jaw and overbite which stood him in good stead as Freddie Mercury emanates a fragility that we don’t associate with movie cops but surely that is a good thing. Leto goes out of his way to be unlikable and he succeeds.

To his credit Hancock allows his narrative to breathe instead of forcing it with plot twists and shocks and horrors, leaving things such as the reasons for Deke's broken marriage to be inferred and, despite the genre form, staying focussed on the humanity of his characters or in Sparma's case, lack of it.

FYI: Deke is a deputy sheriff in Kern County, a real place in California. In Se7en when Somerset and Mills head out of town on the freeway they pass a slip road for Kern Ave. That's quite a coincidence.

 

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