The Limehouse Golem (15, 109 mins)
Director: Juan Carlos Medina
Stars: Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke, Douglas Booth, Eddie Marsan
In the engaging but overstuffed The Limehouse Golem, he plays a dapper detective tasked with tracking down a Jack the Ripper-style killer in London’s East End.
Nighy had never played a detective before and took the part in this adaptation of Peter Ackroyd’s novel after his friend Alan Rickman was diagnosed with cancer. But Nighy’s world-weary schtick feels tailor-made for careworn sleuth John Kildare.
The case of The Golem, who named himself after a monster from Jewish folklore, has been a tough nut to crack and Scotland Yard needs someone to blame.
Kildare, repeatedly passed over for promotion because of rumours about his private life (he’s “not the marrying kind”), is an obvious scapegoat.
But there’s a flipside to this set-up: an outsider has nothing to lose and, to his bosses’ dismay, Kildare starts meddling in a closed case.
The husband of music hall star “Little Lizzie” (Olivia Cooke) has been poisoned and the police have her down as the killer.
With her show trial just days away, Kildare begins to suspect she is also the victim of a set-up. Evidence suggests her husband was The Golem, making his death either suicide or self-defence.
The plot thickens when Kildare discovers The Golem left messages about the murders in a book by Thomas De Quincey in the British Library Reading Room.
After checking the library admissions book, a list of suspects emerges: Lizzie’s husband, cross-dressing entertainer Dan Leno (Douglas Booth), writer George Gissing and father of communism Karl Marx.
Director Juan Carlos Medina and screenwriter Jane Goldman take us inside Kildare’s head as he imagines each man committing the grisly murders. A sequence where Marx takes a saw to a prostitute is my favourite bit of the film.
As Kildare interviews Lizzie in her cell, another tale begins to crash in. Before she became Little Lizzie, she was slum girl Elizabeth who forced her way into the theatrical life after befriending comic/singer/ drag act Leno.
Cooke soon begins to eclipse Nighy as the film’s lead. We see her getting her first break after a drunken dwarf dies after falling downstairs. To quieten the crowd, she puts on one of his tiny costumes and improvises a routine.
She’s such a hit, sleazy music hall impresario Uncle (Eddie Marsan) moves her to the top of the bill. As her star rises she crosses swords with a jealous trapeze artist (Maria Valverde) and attracts the attention of creepy wannabe playwright John Cree (Sam Reid).
We also get some lively recreations of music hall routines and a fine turn from Booth, who channels Russell Brand as the foppish entertainer.
But this is a lot of plot to cram into a 109-minute film and at times you wonder if Ackroyd’s novel would have made a better TV mini-series.
There’s a TV feel to the production design, too. The music hall scenes were shot in a studio, with cobbled streets in West Yorkshire doubling up for the Victorian East End. It may have worked for the budget but you expect to see more of London for the price of a cinema ticket.