We’ll get to to the juicy and suspenseful murder mystery in a moment, but all discussion about The Limehouse Golem must begin with Bill Nighy. As Scotland Yard detective John Kildare, Nighy and his late Victorian suits seem like they’ve stepped out of a painting. It’s not just the way he looks or talks, but his elegant stride, his mercurial humour as he scrutinises clues and the way he deflects questions or reminders about his station in life. He is a greatly respected man, but one who will likely never get the position he deserves thanks to suspicions of “not being the marrying kind”.
Indeed, his newest case, finding the Jack the Ripper-esque Limehouse Golem, is set up to fail. No one can crack this one, so when he comes up blank it will be easy to pin the blame on him. There is, however, a new angle when the husband of a famous musical hall actress turns up poisoned, and she is blamed. Kildare suspects that he was actually the wanted killer, and that he offed himself out of guilt. If he can prove this, he’s got his monster, and he also saves an innocent woman from the gallows.
The joy and satisfaction men have in “saving women” is, when you get past the wonderfully detailed look at life in an 1880s theatre company, what this movie is all about. Well, that and some stylised beheadings. The term “white knight” is thrown around a few times, and by the end some of the duplicitous jerks may as well be saying “but I’m a nice guy!” It doesn’t seem so at first, but this lurid London thriller ends up being something of a feminist film.
Elizabeth (Olivia Cooke), who is as much the main character as Nighy’s detective, is the accused music hall star who comes from humble roots working as a sailcloth sewer. She had an abusive mother who, while it is left a little vague, scars her in a manner such that she remains disinterested in sex as an adult. What does move her is acting, which she somewhat falls into after becoming a stagehand with a company led by the comedian/singer/drag artist Dan Leno (Douglas Booth) and seemingly charitable “Uncle” (Eddie Marsan).
After one of their troupe (a lewd dwarf) dies in an accident, Elizabeth puts on one of his costumes and improvises a bit as a “salty sailor”. It’s a swift success and suddenly she is co-headlining the show. As her star rises she meets John (Sam Reid), a young scholar and would-be playwright, who we may remember from the film’s framing device as the dead husband.
The tale is told in flashback as Kildare questions Elizabeth to formulate a defence, but he’s also interrogating other suspects so he can prove the late John Cree guilty by process of elimination. The Limehouse Golem, as the serial killer calls himself, has to be one of the few people who were in the British Museum reading room (“the furnace where the future is forged!”) on a certain date. Others who were there include Karl Marx and George Gissing.
As Kildare approaches each suspect he tests their handwriting, which affords director Juan Carlos Median an opportunity to get creative with lighting and sound design as we envision each character committing a gruesome murder. It is, admittedly, amusing to see the ridiculously bearded Karl Marx with an overblown German-Jewish accent saw someone’s head off.
There are a lot of twists and turns in the plot, but not all of them are satisfying. What does work are the performances, specifically Cooke and the richly sympathetic character she creates. Her husband thinks so, too, which is why he spends most of their time together writing a play about his idealised vision of her, and how he fits in as her saviour. The problem comes when fantasy and reality fail to meet.
Just when you think you never want to see another 1880s London prostitute get stabbed by a mysterious psychopath, along comes a movie like this that puts a nice spin on it. Median’s style favours a shimmering, high-contrast texture with cold blue and grey exteriors, making the warm, orange-lit theatre even more inviting. Naturally anyone living in such a cruel place would be drawn to the world of make-believe.
