Northampton, the magical potency of fiction, eternalism … Alan Moore, recovering graphic novelist and screenwriter of The Show, gives his longtime preoccupations a vaudevillian twirl in this cinematic outing that – unusually – is not based on one of his comics. He gives himself a twirl too, cameoing in this Northampton noir as a ghastly light-entertainment throwback with hair and beard styled into a crescent moon.
The Souvenir’s Tom Burke plays Fletcher Dennis, a private eye dispatched to the dead centre of middle England by East End hardnut Bleaker (Christopher Fairbank) to locate the lover who fatally battered his daughter and recover a Rosicrucian pendant stolen from her. But digging around Northampton, the detective – via a plummy dame (Siobhan Hewlett) admitted to the hospital on the same night as the now-deceased lothario – uncovers a string of weird coincidences. Notably, why all leads point towards a burned-down nightspot in which Metterton and Matchbright, a pair of seedy Pete’n’Dud-style comedians, perished in 1973.
The plot is a Chandlerian shoal of red herrings but, like Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics, no detail is accidental: from the pun-strewn flyposters to Fletcher’s Dennis the Menace red-and-black sweatshirt. The film’s oppressive web of tales and fictions, so inherent to the detective genre, steer Fletcher’s course towards a dark dream realm where he will end up “fishing with the sleepers”. Down there is the presiding spirit Metterton (meta – geddit?), played by Moore, who declares open war on less purposeful amusements: “What I’ve got is a plot. A good old-fashioned word, a gunpowder plot. Although, frankly, Guy Fawkes couldn’t plot to save his life, just like a modern film.”
This film isn’t without weaknesses. Moore’s logorrheic style has its reasons – reinvesting in the word in an age of visual decadence – but it can be fatiguing, as well as relegating director Mitch Jenkins to something of a magician’s assistant, supplying hoary expressionism by way of misdirection while the characters get sucked into the film’s deterministic scheme. But if The Show does occasionally feel inert, it’s capable of eerie feeling, when its players seem aware of being under the lights, repeating lines that have been in eternal preparation. In the face of that kind of cosmic realisation, all else is light entertainment – and this dense but witty film is never caught short for a flourish.
• The Show is available on digital platforms from 18 October.
