The Limehouse Golem review – dirty deeds done dead well

All the world’s a bloody stage in this gothic Victorian East End melodrama, splendidly adapted from a 1994 novel by Peter Ackroyd. A tale of theatrical murder drenched in the rich hues of classic-period Hammer, this gaslit treat sets Bill Nighy’s Scotland Yard detective on the trail of a grisly killer in 1880s London. Swinging between the ghoulish gaiety of the music hall and the grim stench of the morgue, the second feature from Insensibles/Painless director Juan Carlos Medina is a deliciously subversive affair, nimbly adapted by super-sharp screenwriter Jane Goldman and vivaciously played by an impressive ensemble cast.

“Let us begin, my friends, at the end,” drawls our host, drawing back the curtain on a city terrorised by a killer named after a beast from Jewish folklore. Inspector John Kildare (Nighy) is the investigative fall guy, assigned to an apparently unsolvable case that has gripped the public imagination but baffled the police. A connection to the Ratcliffe Highway murders, about which Thomas De Quincey wrote, seems to offer a lead. Tantalisingly, the killer has scrawled accounts of their crimes among the pages of De Quincy’s satirical text, putting four potential readers at the British Library in the frame: novelist George Gissing (Morgan Watkins), philosopher Karl Marx (Henry Goodman), music hall favourite Dan Leno (Douglas Booth) and the enigmatic John Cree (Sam Reid, channelling Richard Chamberlain). The last of these is a journalist-turned-playwright whose board-treading wife, Elizabeth (Olivia Cooke), now stands accused of poisoning her husband. Kildare is convinced of her innocence, but the noose of guilt is gradually tightening around both their necks.

From the first crimson-soaked murder to the blackly comic curtain call, The Limehouse Golem revels in the bawdy interplay between fact and fiction, between real life and staged death. An early crime scene is overrun by “locals looking for entertainment… cheaper than a ticket to a shocker”. A scrawled Latin inscription (“He who observes spills no less blood than he who inflicts the blow”) implicates the audience in these murders, while the Golem’s first kill is likened to the work of “an understudy, not yet ready for this great stage”. When John woos “Little Lizzie” with talk of saving the heroine of his maudlin play Misery Junction, he intentionally blurs the line between his fictional heroine and his real-life muse. Later in the dock, the actress is ironically accused of “playing a role”.

Unfolding in unreliable flashback to crowd-pleasing musical accompaniment (What Did She Know About Railways? makes a boisterous appearance), this narrative leads us a merry dance. Cinematographer Simon Dennis contrasts the warm colours of the theatre with the misty shadows of the streets, while drained tones paint the courtroom scenes as little more than an empty sideshow. As for the graphic crime re-enactments (dramatised readings of the killer’s diaries), they keep the horrors at a distance through a carefully constructed air of artifice. In this world, all boundaries are fluid – performance and reality, past and present, male and female.

It’s notable that Lizzie first charms her audiences dressed as a man, while her mentor, Leno, is an accomplished female impersonator (Douglas Booth reportedly won the key role partly on the strength of his portrayal of Boy George in the BBC’s Worried About the Boy). As for Kildare, rumours about his sexuality (“not the marrying kind”) have apparently stymied his career, although Daniel Mays’s down-to-earth Constable Flood significantly takes such stories in his stride. Nighy and Mays make a terrific double act, their relationship nicely balanced between formal frostiness and bickering affection. It’s a pleasure to watch them together. Hats off, too, to the mercurial Eddie Marsan who adds an unexpected smack to the backstage shenanigans. As for Cooke, she rises admirably to the chameleonic challenge of Lizzie, a woman whose life has taken her from the marshes to the mansions and who can play to the stalls and balconies alike.

There are echoes of the strange case of James Maybrick (considered by some to be Jack the Ripper), but there’s something altogether more mythical about this moderately budgeted yet very handsome movie. Over the years Ackroyd’s novel has been variously attached to everyone from Merchant Ivory to Terry Gilliam and Neil Jordan, and is now dedicated to Alan Rickman, who was once earmarked to play Kildare. Like its subject, the book has proved a slippery subject, but these players do it proud.