The Edinburgh film festival has acted astutely in giving its opening slot to Robert Carlyle’s feature directing debut: this will make a big night for one of Scotland’s most beloved acting sons, while the film itself is a lovingly crafted tribute to the city at the other end of the M8. You might call it a peace offering to Glasgow, in this era of burgeoning national identity.
Carlyle, best known for firecracker performances in films such as Trainspotting and The Full Monty, here cuts a somewhat more morose figure. He plays Barney Thomson, the central figure of a black-comic serial-killer yarn that has had its titled nudged from its source material, The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson, by Douglas Lindsay.
The original title is a tad less rousing than the movie’s, but it does give some sense of Thomson’s phantasmagoric experience as he crisscrosses the city in the small hours, often as not with a body stuffed in the boot of his car. Thomson is a Glaswegian variant on Sweeney Todd: a discontented barber whose proximity to razors, scissors and leather seating does not bode well for the population statistics.
Thomson, though, is not a chair-slasher per se. An embittered figure, pushed further and further towards the back of the shop, his first brush with homicide is essentially accidental, as he snuffs out his boss during a fight. We have already been made aware that Scotland is in the grip of a peculiarly unpleasant, almost James Ellroy-esque, murder spree featuring body parts, so it is the work of a moment for Thomson to try to get rid of the body amid the general corpse-littering.
However, Thomson fails to escape the attention of the police who, led by an explosively foulmouthed Ray Winstone, are desperate to secure a result on the bigger set of killings. (Winstone’s detective has his own increasingly fraught subplot, scrapping over the case with a rival copper, played by Extras’ Ashley Jensen.) Thomson’s mum (Emma Thompson) takes an interest in her boy’s plight; any elucidation of exactly how would give the film’s game away, but it may be worth pointing out that, facial prosthesis and makeup notwithstanding, Thompson is, at 56, only two years older than Carlyle.
Bizarre though this age differential is (would it have even be considered the other way round?), Thompson puts in a game, raddled performance; her and Winstone’s presence, as well as Tom Courtenay as an acerbic police chief, appear to show that Carlyle is pulling in big favours from his acting-world pals.
They have no cause to feel let down, or embarrassed; as a director, Carlyle keeps on top of the story’s increasingly deranged twists and turns, even if the Tarantino-esque mix of gore and comedy clashes oddly with more studied moments of localism. The fundamentally unserious tone is perhaps not what you’d associate with Carlyle, but presumably that’s why he made it. And it makes a promising start to the festival.
