Franklyn [DVD] [2008]

This is a strange film. The first time I watched it, after about 20 minutes, I thought I'd made a mistake - it seemed directionless and disjointed. But I stuck with it. At the end, I thought 'I've got to watch that again'.

The second time I watched it, I was engrossed from the beginning. It is a really beautiful film, and so, so sad. It's about four damaged people. It's about delusion and illusion. A girl who is trying to make suicide into an art form, a young man whose fiancée didn't turn up for their marriage, a man looking for his son and mourning the death of his daughter. All these people inhabit a thoroughly mundane London. But the fourth lives in Meanwhile City - where everyone, except him, has a religion and non-believers are hunted by the police. The police look like old-fashioned 'Peelers' with high top-hats and dark glasses. Meanwhile City is very reminiscent of Brazil. But the religions are not fanatical - how about 'The Seventh Day Manicurists' - it's simply that you must have one.

The story cuts from the dark, Gothic Meanwhile City straight to the broad daylight concrete ordinariness of Centre Point - it's really jarring and unwelcome, but slowly the stories start to intertwine, the motives and backgrounds start becoming clearer - and the gradually unfolding tragedy becomes more and more compelling. And the end had me in tears.

It's not a sci-fi film, whatever it may be billed as. It's a story about damaged people trying to make sense of what's happened and is happening to them - it's just extreme.

Honestly, it's a mess of a film but it's somehow beautiful, entrancing too. It stays with you. I've got to watch it again.

This film did not get well reviewed on release, but I have to admit that I liked it a lot. There are three characters in three plot strands set in present day London. They are all people dealing with loss and vacancies in their lives. The forth character is also dealing with a similar painful loss, but his way of coping is to retreat into an alternative city, called Meanwhile, and so his strand is distinctly sci-fi. This vaguely steam-punky (and very Gothic) city is neatly meshed with the real London, with regard to both the plot and how the vast computer-created vistas blend with bits of real London. There's much filming around the Naval College in Greenwich, as ever, with the roofscape of the Victoria and Albert Museum featuring too, I think, and the interior of the Royal Courts of Justice. I think that if this film had done without the sci-fi bits and had a name like Michael Winterbottom attached to it it would've got better reviews, and been very much less interesting.

A mysterious masked man called Jonathan explains that he is going to kill someone that night, we then get the backstory leading up to this event...

...His retrospective tells of the grip of religion, how it is used for social control, and how he is investigating one such religious group who have abducted a girl - one whom he is tasked with rescuing. After learning that the girl was killed he is arrested and gaoled, only to be released four years later on condition that he kill the man responsible for the girl's death. Freedom and revenge - a sweet deal.

This is filmed as a dark fantasy with massive gothic buildings and impressive cityscapes which look like something from Tolkien blended with Blade Runner. This contrasts against the other plotlines which are set in contemporary Britain. The dark fairytale and the modern stories both have parallels, the same characters appear and the plots intertwine. It feels a bit messy at first but after a while you can see how the stories are starting to converge and eventually they intersect, the separate plots come together and we see where the stylistic gothic plot involving the masked man originates.

I heard that many people gave up on this film after watching for a while and finding the various sub plots dauntingly difficult to understand, but everything makes sense in the end, and if you can't see it coming after while then you'll certainly recognise it during the final scenes. Franklyn seems to have been marketed in away which appealed to fans of comicbook action films only to disappoint them. I must admit that I thought it was along those sorts of lines, but it isn't. It isn't an action film, though it certainly does have some action early on, it delves into the psychology of several different people whose lives are linked by different events.

In a nutshell: A film which appears to be a comic-hero fantasy with a damning take on religion and the apathetic masses who blindly follow a religious yet Godless society in a grim future, turns into a drama involving a complex web of relationships which are cleverly weaved to come together for the films finale. Impressive visuals enable two parallel realities to exist alongside each other and keep you wanting to know the relevance of it all.