Luther, The Fallen Sun is a BBC production of a highly literate and complex stage-play revolving upon Martin Luther's relationship with fellow reformer, Melancthon, a film that explores the theological imagination in the context of 16th century politics. I'm just kidding: Luther, in fact, is a spin-off from a popular BBC crime series starring Idris Alba as the titular DCI (Detective Chief Inspector). The film is efficiently entertaining -- it's jampacked with scary, gruesome imagery and sets off at a gallop and never pauses to take a breath. I watched the gory thriller through to its end after two hours and two minutes of non-stop mayhem (the film lists at 2 hours and seven minutes, but the last five are titles showing that the picture was shot in London and Iceland with second-unit footage involving a vehicle sinking to the bottom of icy lake apparently filmed in Brussels where there is some kind of giant tank of green-blue water.) The movie zooms forward at a breakneck pace to keep you from thinking about the plot. The story is completely implausible, designed to deliver murders and mutilation at a rate of about 10 - 15 casualties an hour. Indeed, the narrative is so stupid that it's an insult to the viewers. In many ways, the film exemplifies what is wrong with big Netflix productions intended to garner a sizeable international audience -- everything is designed to compel your attention and if this require a half-dozen scenes of torture or mutilation, then, this is what the movie delivers. I felt vaguely ashamed of the time I spent watching the movie. (I could have spent the two hours reading Mrs. Dalloway.)
The unfortunate thing about Luther is that there's the kernel of a scary dystopian movie buried beneath the layers of lurid gore -- so it's a missed opportunity. The film's premise is that everyone has done something that is criminal and concealed that act. But we are surrounded by the prying eyes and ears of electronic devices, apparatus to which we confess our sins and secret shame (such as watching Luther instead of reading Mrs. Dalloway) and that these devices catalog our offenses and report them to sinister forces engaged in perpetual surveillance. There is a Black Mirror aspect to the film in which our humble computers and Alexa systems conspire with vicious international criminals to gather Kompromat on each and every one of us. In Baltic countries that you can't even find on a map, hundreds of agents study our confessions and amass evidence of our crimes so that an evil criminal mastermind, the 21st century equivalent of Dr. Mabuse, can blackmail us. Mabuse forced his victims into complicity with his criminal enterprises by hypnosis; the bad guy in Luther, played by the inimitably weird-looking Andy Serkis (Gollum in The Lord of the Rings series) compels his victims into murder and suicide by threatening to post screen shots of their on-line indiscretions to their mothers and children and business associates. (I write this note a couple days after the US congress members grilled Tik Tok executives, asserting with a blithe lack of evidence that the app on our cell-phones is retailing our dance routines and cute pet footage to the Chinese Communists.) There is something witty and paranoically compelling about the notion that our digital servants, such things as porno websites, ring-camera surveillance systems, and baby monitors, are collecting evidence of our crimes and broadcasting that information to sinister criminal enterprises -- apparently consisting of hundreds of agents, goons, sadists, all in thrall to a mastermind criminal managing his torturous enterprise from a veritable Fortress of Solitude, a white mansion full of horrors located on top of a glacier located beyond a tunnel-like access road through 12 foot snow drifts at the North Pole (or, at least, close to it.) There's an icy lake, an abyss that has no bottom, where the bad guy stores the cadavers of his victims, thawing them out from time to time and arranging them as mannequins at his baroque crime scenes. This is all idiotic but it touches on something that is genuinely frightening -- our on-line signature convicts of all sorts of crimes and everyone can be blackmailed. When the bad guy frames Luther, thought to be a righteous copper, he is immediately (and, apparently, justly) convicted of his crimes -- no one disputes the validity of the conviction. If the truth about us were to be known, all of us would be convicted -- as Shakespeare says none shall " 'scape whipping."
The villain lures a kid away from his night janitorial job, abducts him using a fake accident and one of his innumerable frozen cadavers, and, then, tortures the kid to death in some namelessly gruesome way. (The bad guy records the death throes of his victims and uses those sounds to terrorize his foes.) Luther promises the mother of the deceased lad that she will catch the killer. But the murderer exposes Luther's crimes and he goes to jail. In prison, fellow prisoners torment the copper until he stages a big, brutal riot to secures transfer from the gaol (as they say in the UK) and his later escape. On the lam, Luther hunts down the villain -- this is a Hitchcock double-chase, with the cops chasing Luther who is chasing the mad serial killer. (The villain is a "City Trader" whatever that means -- he's got limitless resources and seems to own all of Estonia. He's a nasty guy: he's burned his wife beyond all recognition but keeps her alive in a state of ghastly disfigurement so that he can torment her. Of course, like all villains of this sort, he's prone to haranguing and, of course, leaves a trail of clues that will, in the end, result in his demise.) Luther closes in on the bad guy after various adventures and corners him in Piccadilly Circus. But the villain has about eight people blackmailed into hurling themselves off adjacent buildings, resulting in mass chaos, car crashes, and confusion in which he makes his escape. The investigation is spearheaded by a feisty Black woman, DCI, Raynes. When we see Raynes' teenage daughter, the shape of the second half of the film is instantly obvious: the villains kidnaps the girl and somehow imprisons her in his Fortress of Solitude in northern Norway, obviously within the Arctic Circle. Luther and Raynes pursue the bad guy to his HQ where the villain has imprisoned about eighty people, planning to torture them to death in a so-called "Red Room" spectacle -- apparently, internet sadists have paid to watch the bad guy and his Estonian henchmen kill these people in gruesome ways according to on-line specifications submitted by subscribers. The moronic villain decides to murder both Rayne and Luther whom he has captured as an entracte before the main event.. With an audience of about 200 online gawkers, the villain harangues the two coppers and, then, ridiculously enough decides to give them lethal weapons with which they are supposed to torture each other to death for the amusement of the internet lurkers. Raynes and Luther aren't gagged and so they can lecture the villain on his perfidy and terrorize his torture-subscribers who all depart the room -- this is picturesquely, if idiotically, shown by red video lights on cameras going out one by one. Of course, Luther uses the weapon with which he's supposed to draw and quarter Raynes to kill a couple henchmen and escape. The torture room floods with kerosene for a fiery denouement. But it's not just fire but ice. The villain flees in a snow-machine, battles Luther while the vehicle careens wildly over the fissured glacier -- why it keeps plowing forward during the big fist-fight and duel in the machine remains inexplicable to me. The snow-machine crashes through the ice and sinks into an apparently bottomless lake. Fortunately, there's a helicopter full of police scuba divers (why?) who rescue Luther. The villain drowns. When the kerosene is ignited in the torture room, the plucky copper, DCI Raynes and her daughter turn out to have access to fire hoses (the villain has tortured his victims by spraying them with fire hoses) and so the flames are extinguished. It's a happy ending, with DCI Luther's crimes forgiven, if you can forget the thirty or so gruesome killings that led to the climax.
From my summary of the action, you may think that I've made the movie seem more ridiculous than it is. In fact, the film is much more idiotic than my capsule account suggests. Luther is constantly getting beaten and abused and stabbed, hosed down and set afire -- he gets battered in the prison riot (broken ribs), his nose is broken and he gets stabbed in the side, a wound he treats with super-glue; at the villain's Fortress of Solitude, he gets stabbed again, beaten up, and, then, wrestles with the bad guy in an eye-gouging fight in the out-of-control snow vehicle -- then, he's drowned full fathom five before the scuba divers appear at the last minute to rescue him. Idris Elba's Luther is likeable enough. Apparently, someone thought that movie should be rated PG notwithstanding it's torture porn aspects. Although all sorts of perversion is implied, there's no sex, no nudity, and I don't think the word "fuck" is used except maybe once or twice.
Do yourself a favor, read Mrs. Dalloway instead; the novel is also set in London with some scenes in Piccadilly Circus. If you want to read To the Lighthouse, that's okay with me too.
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