THE YOUNG POISONER'S HANDBOOK (45)

Directed by: Benjamin Ross

Starring: Hugh O'Conor, Antony Sher, Charlotte Coleman

The Pitch: A young man with an unhealthy interest in applied toxicology - viz., poisoning people - wreaks havoc in late-60s England.

Theo Sez: Does this have any idea how chilling it is? Probably - it moves with the controlled intelligence of a confident film that knows exactly what it's doing ; then again, why does it try to pass itself off as a comedy (albeit a dark one)? Its joke is that the titular hero is a murderer with the soul of an accountant, reducing his victims to facts and figures without even realising what he's doing ; it's a promisingly acid one, but it really needed the KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS treatment, seeing everything through the murderer's unfeeling eyes. Instead, the poisoner seems eternally out of place in the film's world - its emphasis on physical unpleasantness seems opposed to our hero's cool, cerebral worldview (the point is surely that he doesn't see human suffering), and the copious details of lower-bourgeoisie Britain (puritanism, naff TV shows and endless cups of tea) leave him looking odd and creepy in a way that may not have been intended : at the end, when he's unmasked ("It's him. It was him all along. He's the disease.") it's chilling because his accusers - his victims - seem so sane, so properly indignant. We don't know whether we're being asked to be shocked or amused ; judging by its tone - alternately jolly and intense - neither does the film.