Out Of Blue

Blue Angel

Out Of Blue
2018 UK/USA
Directed by Carol Morley
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Spoilers by implication here.

There’s a moment relatively early on in Out Of Blue when the lead protagonist, detective Mike, played by Patricia Clarkson (exactly why she has a boy’s name and wears men’s clothing is never really addressed), answers another character by saying that she hates the word ‘closure’. Well, I have to say that this film might have been a little more interesting if it had been lacking exactly that. Instead, we seem to have an abundance of closure comprising the DNA of the movie when, honestly, I think we’d have all been better off with a little restraint shown towards the constant spelling out of something which the writer/director Carol Morley still seems to want to play like it’s something of a twist by the end. I’d blame Martin Amis who wrote the source novel, Night Train for the sloppy plot structure here but, a brief summary of the plot of the novel which I looked at (I’ve not read the actual novel myself) suggests that the movie version is a far cry from the original and has not much business being compared to it.

Now, the main reason I wanted to see this movie is because I really like the actress Patricia Clarkson (since first seeing her at the cinema in High Art back in 1998) and I don’t see too much of her in enough films. So a movie where she’s actually playing the lead rather than a supporting part was something I really wanted to have a look at. And I was not let down.... by that element of the film at least. Clarkson is absolutely electric in this... as she always is... and she really does carry this film, it has to be said. Even when she shares screen time with such phenomenal actors here such as James Caan and Toby Jones, she’s still the person you are looking at throughout the entire movie and... that’s exactly what I was expecting from her.

And there are a lot of other cool things about the movie too. The cinematography, shot design and even set dressing is all pretty amazing. The real problem lays in the plot of the film, I believe. Clarkson’s character works homicide for the New Orleans Police Department and she is called in to find out who has killed an astrophysicist (played by Mamie Gummer) and, even from the start of the film, Clarkson’s character is both empathising obsessively with the victim and, also, having these little funny turns where she is either hallucinating or fainting. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for characters or objects to disappear from a scene, literally winking out of existence like David Hemming’s character at the end of Antonioni’s Blow Up, if she’s not keeping an eye on them.And sometimes even when she is.

Meanwhile, the visual syntax of the movie is shot through with a metaphor of the old ‘multiverse’ theory and, frankly, my disappointment doubled when, at the end, this 'image grammar’ didn’t really have much of a pay off and instead was merely being used as a distraction for the audience to try and fox us from cutting to the truth too quickly. There was a movie out earlier in the year called Destroyer (I reviewed it here) which absolutely relied on the audience misinterpreting the narrative structure of that film and, because of the way the director of Destroyer deceived the audience, we really did get an ending we couldn’t see coming. Alas, the visual elusiveness of a totally coherent shot ebb and flow in Out Of Blue isn’t nearly clever enough to distract the audience for long and the damage is already done when, very early on in the movie, the amnesiac element of Clarkson’s back story is mentioned and alarm bells begin to ring. Then, when an old case of linked, unsolved serial killings from a number of decades before is thrown into the mix with regards to the latest crime, it’s really not a very large step for the audience to figure out that this old case will in some way turn out to be of significance, on a personal level, to the main protagonist.

That’s the main problem here, I think. Not only is it easy to figure out both the identity of the killer on the original case and also Clarkson’s character’s link to it that, well... you just assume there’s going to be something more. The way the clues are fed to the audience is so heavy handed, in fact, that there was a point twenty minutes before the end when I thought the film was over as they’d deliberately revealed everything already... or so I assumed. Then we have an almost entirely redundant final 20 minutes or so... nicely shot and interesting to look at but completely superfluous, where we lead up to a big reveal which... yeah, I honestly thought it had been revealed already, much earlier in the film. Quite early in the film, in terms of one of the elements of that twist.

Now that I’ve said all that, however, I would like to reiterate that the film is extremely interesting in terms of both visual design and editing, not to mention Clarkson in a truly captivating performance. So, despite the weak plot and terribly disappointing closure in the movie, it’s actually worth taking a look at if there’s nothing better playing at the cinema. There are even some nice attempts at visual metaphor where a recurring image of some rolling marbles representing planets makes you realise, at one point, that this is because the lead character is probably losing hers. It’s a nice enough movie and certainly not as terrible as some of the more recent cinematic offerings currently doing the rounds but I couldn’t recommend this one if you are after a more mysterious and ultimately thought provoking cinematic experience. There are good movies out there which use astrophysics as a metaphor at the heart of their inherent mystery but, sadly, Out Of Blue isn’t one of them.