Executioner review – sleazy MP hams it up with sex worker in darkly comic blackmail thriller

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Based on actor-director Peter Benedict’s own play this tiny-budget thriller has the feel of a stagey recording as the double-crosses pile up higher than an MP’s promises The fictional shadow cabinet minister at the centre of this darkly comic blackmail thriller is offended when the male prostitute he has hired describes his reputation as “colourful”. Colourful MPs support bloodsports and wear bow ties, he says; he prefers the term “maverick”. It’s never said out loud, but clearly he sits on the right in political terms; you can tell from the sneer in his voice as he utters the word “proletariat”. Executioner is adapted by Peter Benedict from his play Deadlock, with a staginess that feels a bit much for the screen. Benedict also co-directs and stars as the MP, called Robert Marlowe, giving a lip-smacking performance that makes Hannibal Lecter look like a character from kitchen sink realism. The entire film is set in the basement studio of Marlowe’s country pile, where he dabbles in pott...
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‘Life can be complicated’: Rachel Weisz on balancing privacy with stardom

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Her latest TV series calls for her to play both twins in a reworking of Cronenberg’s dark and bloody classic, Dead Ringers. But Rachel Weisz, the famously private Oscar-winner, is used to stepping in and out of roles

There’s quite a lot of blood. There’s really quite a lot of blood in Dead Ringers, but it’s not the blood of bullet holes or stab wounds, or any of the other violences one might expect in a dark psychological thriller like this. It’s blood on knickers and operating tables, and smeared on silk shirts, and the blood as a baby’s head crowns – the bloods of birth and loss, guttural screams, and in the middle of it all, Rachel Weisz, twice.

In David Cronenberg’s original 1988 film, a grisly examination of the relationship between the physical and mental self, Jeremy Irons played twin gynaecologists whose dubious ethics led to all manner of horrors. In this gender-swapped adaptation, in which Weisz stars and exec-produced, she plays those twins identical in every way but character. Dr Beverly Mantle is the shy moral introvert, whose love affair with a patient triggers a psychic unravelling between the sisters, while Elliot is a modern mad scientist, hungry for meat, drugs, conflict, godliness, sex. What could come off as a soapy trick, in Weisz’s Oscar-winning hands becomes camply surreal, uncanny, seductive, a little perverse – joy.

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