Neil Cross’s smash-hit BBC TV crime drama now gets its own standalone feature film, with Idris Elba returning as the troubled London police officer John Luther, effectively continuing the story from the end of the fifth season. This may well play very effectively to the show’s fanbase and there’s certainly an alpha supporting cast including Cynthia Erivo, Andy Serkis and Hattie Morahan.
But I have to say – and those squeamish about spoilers and cliches had better look away now – that without the extended context of longform TV, the greater emphasis on explicit, violent horror is a bit exhausting. The serial-killer accessories feel hand-me-down; the Scandi noir touch is spurious and storylines in the movies about evil criminal plans to livestream snuff-porn are frankly always lame and implausible. At the dawn of the internet age, the snuff-internet-porn-themed film actually became its own yucky and naive subgenre, with movies such as Marc Evans’s My Little Eye and Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover, and it doesn’t deserve a comeback now.
