The Legend of Barney Thomson

The Legend of Barney Thomson (15)

Canada/UK 2015 96 mins  Dir: Robert Carlyle  Starring: Robert Carlyle, Emma Thompson, Ashley Jensen, Ray Winstone, Martin Compston, Stephen McCole, Tom Courtenay

Few first-time directors get to work with a cast as distinguished as Emma Thompson, Ray Winstone and Tom Courtenay. But then few first-time directors are Robert Carlyle. Only one, to be precise. Carlyle’s macabre black comedy of murder and mutilation harks back to Antonia Bird’s under-appreciated Ravenous, in which he was cast as a 19th century cannibal. Thanks to the scene-stealingly grotesque character played by Emma Thompson, it also feels a little like Reece Shearsmith/Steve Pemberton-lite. In fact, it’s adapted from The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson – the first in a series of seven Thomson novels by Douglas Lindsay.

There’s a serial killer on the loose in Glasgow, with a nasty habit of posting body parts to victims’ relatives – an arse here, a todger there, and so on. Sweary top cop Chief Superintendent McManaman (Courtenay) is under pressure to collar the perp, but he struggles to keep the peace between two sets of warring underlings. One is led by alpha female Detective Inspector June Robertson (Jensen from Extras, enjoying herself with lots of shouting in a Glaswegian accent) and the other by intimidating, old-school Cockney Detective Inspector Holdall (Winstone, doing his usual turn with aplomb). Holdall soon has reason to suspect that the killer might be charmless, dour, unpopular narrating hair-snipper Barney Thomson (Carlyle), who lives alone in a “shitey wee flat”. “The last time I had a bird, Shakin’ Stevens was number one,” opines this least likely of demon barbers.

How did Thomson become such an emasculated sad-sack? All is made clear when a prosthetically enhanced Emma Thompson makes her entrance as his monstrous septuagenarian mother Cemolina, a chain-smoking, acid-tongued bingo hag who lives in a tower block and regards her Brylcreemed, ineffectual son with barely concealed contempt. A former prostitute who’d “point ’em round the back so I wouldn’t have to look at their faces,” she’s a fabulously revolting creation and it’s to Carlyle’s great credit that he allows Thompson to steal the film from under his nose like a degenerate Nanny McPhee. Indeed, he gets great performances all round, even from an autopilot Winstone, thanks to some terrific dialogue. (Choice line: “Let’s pump this old bag full of biscuits and make her fucking squeal!”) He also uses his Glasgow locations creatively, cleverly making his film feel as though it could be set in any decade from the 1950s onwards, and just about succeeds in handling the abrupt change of tone required for the Tarantino-esque climax. Curious fact: Emma Thompson is just two years older than Robert Carlyle.