The Critic

When reading the logline for Anand Tucker’s new yarn, one can’t help but think about Theatre of Blood. In that erudite British horror, Vincent Price’s dejected stage thespian adopts his many Shakespearean alter egos to wreak vengeance on the critics who spurned him. In its arch pettiness and deep well of theatre geekery, the film cheekily played on the push-pull of artists and their observers in such a fashion as to seem gift-wrapped for both. With this newer tale of a vengeful theatre critic sowing discord with his poison pen in 1930s London, one thrills at the thought that maybe the critics’ turn has come. Alas, The Critic is an altogether stuffier, more reserved affair; more teatime trifle than midnight howler. 

Still, that’s not to say that a surfeit of flattery for critics is not in store, as the dulcet tones of Sir Ian McKellen dictate to us the great power and importance of the calling. To be a critic, he tells us, is to be both a perfect assassin – elusive, forever alone – and a figure of near-godlike omnipotence. For Jimmy Erskine, the one McKellen plays here, it is to be loved and hated in equal measure by the stage artists who grovel for his approval when not shrinking in terror of him. It’s all charmingly old world, the spectacle of readers hunched over the morning paper, their brows furrowed with apocalyptic portent as they read Erskine’s latest diatribe.

This depiction of the reverence that follows Erskine becomes both The Critic’s primary charm and the source of its one rich dramatic thread. When Erskine falls afoul of the stage ingenue whom he has belittled (Gemma Arterton), there is a curious, almost tender charge to the actors’ combative interplay. The co-dependency of artists craving praise and the art lovers who withhold it is little explored, and one wishes it were something The Critic were more genuinely interested in. McKellen and Arterton suggest a mutual longing that one will in some way heal the other’s deep-seated hurt, but this theme is lost the more the film descends into unconvincing potboiler territory.

Erskine has a scheme afoot, and broadly speaking, it involves Arterton’s insecure actress, the security of his job and his weary editor (Mark Strong). And it is here that the tale’s unwavering belief in Erskine’s influence and power comes to strain believability to breaking point. Is the favour of a critic powerful enough to dictate the behaviour of others, to the point of crossing moral boundaries? For The Critic’s later developments to work, one must believe it to be so, but we never do. Perhaps it’s because all the other players in this drama come to feel more like buttons for Erskine to press than true characters in their own right. Ultimately, what aims for tragic grandeur winds up at silly, and certainly never scandalous. “Where’s the lightness? Where’s the wit?”, one character demands. The dramatic flatness of the final outcome is something Erskine himself may have taken issue with.

Thomas Messner

The Critic is released nationwide on 13^th September 2024.

Watch the trailer for The Critic here: