This atmospheric black and white adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic classic from Hope Dickson Leach, the director of The Levelling, opens with a tremendous shiver of menace. In the dead of night, as an eerily inhuman singsong echoes on the soundtrack, a little girl walks along an alleyway. Something steps out of the shadows. From behind, it appears to be a man, a gentleman – in a top hat and exquisitely tailored shirt. But the way it moves, gliding like a predator towards the girl, is hardly human; then it savages her with the rotting teeth of an animal. Perhaps nothing else that follows quite lives up to this taste of evil.
Dickson Leach’s film adds to the pile of 120-plus screen versions of Jekyll and Hyde. This one started out last year as a “hybrid-production” staged in an Edinburgh theatre: for three nights, audiences sat in front of a screen watching a live stream of actors performing scenes on sets around the theatre. That footage has been edited – with added effects – to make this film. And it really does feel like a feature film (rather than filmed theatre): stylishly shot with a noirish feel, velvety rich black and white cinematography, camera furtively lurking in the shadows.
