Beneath the garishly brittle portrait of ghastly westerners lording it up in Morocco, there’s a low-key, brooding quality to this accomplished if somewhat inert screen adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2012 bestseller. Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, whose screen CV includes The Guard (2011), Calvary (2014) and War on Everyone (2016), it’s an anxiously moralist tale of crime and punishment, revenge and resolution, played out against a broad-strokes, culture-clash backdrop that brings a tang of spiteful satire to the deeper discussions of good and evil.
“It’s a long way to go for a party, but then they’re more your friends than mine.” So says David (Ralph Fiennes), a British doctor with a blemished record whom we first meet aboard a boat to “l’Afrique” with his wife, Jo (Jessica Chastain, who co-starred with Fiennes in his 2011 Coriolanus). She’s an unproductive children’s author who has fallen from favour with her young readers – an audience she detests. He is a “highly functioning alcoholic”, a phrase he likens to a double negative, as if one cancels out the other.
