“I CAME BY” My rating: B (Netflix)
110 minutes | No MPAA rating
If you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.
Which brings us to the Brit-made “I Came By,” a modestly effective thriller that cannily recycles characters and ideas from Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”
Along the way this effort allows Hugh Bonneville to join his former “Downton Abby” co-stars in making the leap from genteel civility to bonkers psychopathology.
Bonneville here plays our Norman Bates character…with a dash of Brit class-consciousness stirred in. His Sir Hector Blake is a much-admired former jurist who ended his law career ostensibly because he opposes the racial prejudices baked into the English legal system.
In fact, he’s a killer who keeps a series of young men (at least one of them an illegal immigrant) imprisoned in his basement torture chamber, toying with them until it’s time to dispose of their remains in his late wife’s pottery kiln.
Now I’m not dishing spoilers here…Sir Hector’s secret life is revealed early on in “I Came By.” What makes the film of interest is the way writer/director Babak Anvari toys with our perceptions of just who we’re supposed to root for here.
“Psycho,” of course, was notorious for killing off its leading lady, Janet Leigh, at the end of Act I in that spectacular shower sequence. Nobody saw it coming.
Something like that happens here.
Toby (George McKay) and Jameel (Percale Ascott) are a couple of young activists who have made a career of breaking into the homes of London’s rich and privileged, leaving behind spray-painted graffiti on the living room walls. Their signature message: “I Came By.”
Their partnership breaks up when Jameel learns he’s about to become a father. Thus only Toby shows up to burgle Sir Hector’s posh house…and discover some ugly secrets in the cellar.
Not having much respect for the police, Toby decides to investigate on his own.
Bad decision. The film then shifts to Toby’s mother Lizie (Kelly Macdonald), who alarmed by her son’s disappearance, starts sleuthing on her own. (Think of her as the Vera Miles character in “Psycho”…or is she the Martin Balsam character?)
Anyway, “I Came By” does a nifty job of twisting our expectations. Bonneville’s quietly sinister killer is the stuff of nightmares. That he’s a smug upper class twit only makes his comeuppance more satisfying.
|
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
Leave a Reply