A black comedy about London real estate and the hypocrisies of posh middle-aged professionals? Yes, please.
Sarah (Shirley Henderson: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, T2 Trainspotting) and Tom (Alan Tudyk: Raya and the Last Dragon, Frozen II) are hosting a little dinner party with their pals Richard (Rufus Sewell: The Father, Gods of Egypt) and Beth (Olivia Williams: Victoria & Abdul, The White King)… except Richard and Beth have only gone and let Jessica (Indira Varma: Official Secrets, Exodus: Gods and Kings) tag along with them. They’re all longtime friends — the five of them went to university together — but pushy, obnoxious Jessica is always trouble. The Trouble with Jessica tonight is that she is about to put the kibosh on the sale of Sarah and Tom’s house, a sale they desperately need to go through because they are in a deep financial hole that threatens their upscale lifestyle and from which only the sale can rescue them.
What happens next is that, um, a rather inconvenient dead body turns up on the premises, which freaks out Sarah and Tom: not quite because there’s a dead body right there, but because if word of this gets around, their buyer will surely back out: who wants to buy a property that has so recently hosted a freshly dead body? (The house is gorgeous — there’s some serious interiors porn going on here — and the leafy north-London location is perfection itself, but people can be weird about dead bodies.) What can possibly be done about this situation?
Now, if you haven’t seen the trailer, give it a miss: Trouble isn’t a mystery but the less you know going in, the more fun you’ll have. The pleasures of this nasty little tale are not in the plot, however, but in the watching the terrific cast embody the entertainingly horrible people they are quickly exposed as when crisis hits. The politeness and the propriety that friendships and marriages run on are fractured, and longstanding secrets and past dirty deeds are weaponized. Claws are out, and the entire cast, particularly Henderson, are having a ball with it.
The dynamic is intimate in the same way that a stage play is: Trouble takes place over the course of a single evening and doesn’t leave the environs of the house until late on. The script, by director Matt Winn with James Handel, is original — it’s not adapted from the stage — but it’s also more like a play in that it is less about propelling the characters toward transformation and growth than it is about revealing who they really are… in fact, they may be unable to grow even after what they experience here. Their hidebound hearts may be the nastiest thing about them.
more films like this:
• The Party [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Kanopy US | Mubi UK | BFI Player UK | Curzon Home Cinema UK]
• Shallow Grave [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | BFI Player UK]
