The Limehouse Golem
Directed by Juan Carlos Medina and based on Peter
Ackroyd’s 1994 book Dan Leno and the
Limehouse Golem, this film is a must for fans of TV’s Ripper Street series in particular (also set in 1880s London),
or indeed Victorian melodrama in general.
The story is a double-pronged criminal intrigue
encompassing both a domestic poisoning and a series of other seemingly
unconnected and (trust me) grisly serial murders. Assigned the task of solving
these crimes is the suave Inspector Kildare (Bill Nighy). The film opens with the
domestic incident - the death by poisoning of John Cree, husband of Lizzie. Although
she is arrested and tried for her husband’s killing, Kildare is convinced throughout
of her innocence. As he fights to keep her from the gallows, we find ourselves gradually
drawn into the tragic story of ‘Lambeth Lizzie’s earlier life. Brought up by a
cruel mother, she is later taken in by music hall folk when orphaned and it is
here that she meets and marries the aspiring playwright John Cree. But why, and
at whose hand, does he meet his death? Did he abuse her once too often? Or has
he too been done to death by the Golem, a mythical figure from Jewish folklore
who the public assume to be responsible for the other killings, so ferocious and
‘inhuman’ are the attacks? The plot leads us up no end of blind alleys and is a baroque mixture of fictional and actual historical figures, incl. George Gissing and Karl Marx, Dan Leno and John Cree. All are frequenters of the British Library and readers of a book in which the killer has scrawled messages in his victims’ blood. They are therefore all at some time in the frame for the murders. The film’s structure takes the form of a series of multi-tiered flashbacks. Weaving our way through a complex interplay between truth and fiction, between real life (the infamous Ratcliffe Highway murders of this period are referenced more than once) and the staged version, we reach a startling - and for me unexpected - conclusion.
The atmosphere of the time is well captured, giving a real sense of late 19th century Limehouse – the poverty, destitution, widespread child cruelty and prostitution, and opium dens. And there is some great acting here too. Bill Nighy is suitably sombre (no daft twitches here!) as he sets about grappling with this seemingly intractable case. It is revealed early on that he is “not the marrying kind” and this adds an extra layer to his characterisation, as do the intimations of lesbianism around Lizzie’s character, superbly played by Olivia Cooke. Other familiar faces include Daniel Mays, his down-to-earth Constable Flood providing the perfect complement to the debonair, enigmatic Kildare. I also particularly liked the range of oddball characters in the music hall. They are all there: the randy midget, the louche transvestite, and the lascivious stage manager (“just call me Uncle”) played superbly by Eddie Marson (was there ever an actor more suited to creepy roles?). But top of the bill for me has to be the character of Dan Leno, probably the Victorian era’s most famous comedian, played by a gorgeously effete Douglas Booth.
Despite having to watch the violent bits through my fingers (the Evening Standard’s film critic describes the film as “riotously gory”), I really enjoyed this movie. The music hall scenes not only perfectly captured the sweaty crush of the hoi polloi at play - visually like something straight out of a Walter Sickert painting – I also got a bit of a singalong! Fortunately, the cinema was half empty so nobody batted an eyelid when I joined in with ‘she’d never had her ticket punched before’ in the back row. For anyone like me who is a sucker for this kind of penny-dreadful-style entertainment, The Limehouse Golem makes for a very satisfying hour and a half.
