Sleuth (2007)

Synopsis: In a modern manor, a wealthy novelist (Michael Caine) matches wits with the unemployed actor (Jude Law) who ran off with his wife in a twisted game with dangerous consequences.

I’ll keep this review brutally short in an attempt to ape the master of that strategy, Nobel Laureate playwright and screenwriter, Harold Pinter. Imitation is, after all, the best form of flattery. That maxim is apt for Sleuth. First came the 1970 Tony Award winning play by Anthony Shaffer. Then the 1972 film adaptation starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine as the younger man.

And now, Pinter has recast it with his expert feel for menace and intrigue. Sleuth provides visual and thematic echoes of Pinter’s earliest stage play, 'The Dumb Waite', in which two men face off amid mysterious environmental influences. The dialog is similarly theatrical and staccato, but the presentation here by Kenneth Branagh is terrifically cinematic.

Pinter has the ability to conjure more tension from two or three characters than some films do even if given the Cold War to work with. He is assisted by wonderful production design by Tim Harvey (who also did Branagh's Hamlet, 1996) that gives the novelist’s modernist manor an icily alien character, making it a silent observer and sometimes robotic participant in the gameplay between the two men.

Branagh’s direction draws out the introspection and inversions of the exchange. The camera flits from detail to detail like the eye of the nervous actor, not sure where the danger is coming from or which detail is most important. The performances, particularly Law’s, are very impressive. The tables are turned (how many times!), all seems not quite right, and the characters continually twist our perceptions until the final moment. Bravo!

FYI:  This is the second film of Michael Caine’s to be remade some decades later with Jude Law taking his original role. The first was Alfie (2004).
 

 

 

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