The Young Poisoner's Handbook

Deny it all you want, but films about psychopaths and serial killers can be quite, well, interesting. Take Graham Young for example. Played by Hugh O'Conor as a downtrodden, spiteful nerd genius, Young was the product of a dysfunctional family and a chemistry whiz. If only, as my mother says, he had used his talents for good instead of evil.

     The Young Poisoner's Handbook, the 1995 debut full-length feature by British director Benjamin Ross, follows the "Teacup Killer" Young from the age of fourteen into his early adulthood. And what a fascinating character he is.

   All but incapable of identifying with the suffering of others, Young was both a racist and a psychopath. Later in his life, he laments that things turned out "all wrong" for him. As a boy, he poisons his none-too-bright schoolmate Mick (Jack Deam's) ham sandwich and makes him violently ill and takes over Mick's date.

   There are many good ironic and blackly comic moments in this otherwise dark and morbidly intriguing crime drama. The writer never tries too hard, which is the key. Hugh O'Conor was in a another, inferior film with dark comedy elements, Botched, which applied an over-the-top villain and manic pacing in order to achieve laughs.

     Take the date between Young and Sue (Samantha Edmonds), a girl who works in the London library, for instance. The scene where they pick up his fallen books is set up like a conventional romance, with them awkwardly meeting each other's eyes and Sue initiating a date.

    Then it knocks any "romantic" vibe on it's head, as Graham becomes increasingly inappropriate and morbid, soon bringing the date to an abrupt end. This isn't just teenage awkwardness. Something is just not going to the top floor.

   Hugh O'Conor is quite good, although he doesn't reach the brilliance as a sociopath of Noah Taylor in Simon Rumley's Red, White,& Blue. He is manipulative, wide-eyed, and sometimes strangely likable, and I can think of only one scene where his performance halted.

   I like the film's decision to meld disturbing and funny, like Tarantino, but without the constant f-bombs and gun play. Dated and oddly festive music is used, in order to provide irony and capture the flavor of 20th-century London. (The film starts out in the 1960's.) There are obvious picks about psychotics and anti-social behavior (The Silence of the Lambs, Taxi Driver, and The Shining to name a few.) And that's all well and good, but then there are movies like these, ripe for rediscovery. For the viewing of films isn't all about watching what your friends have watched, but rather, paving the way for new choices.

 

The Living & the Dead

  Not your first pick for Mother's Day, The Living and the Dead is morbid and horrifying, and I mean that, strangely, as a compliment. It is a family drama, a psychological thriller, a tragedy, an art film, all these things at once, and and despite it's flaws, it doesn't overextend.

   The film opens with Lord Donald Brocklebank (Roger Lloyd-Pack), a worn-down, silent shell of an old man, pushing an empty wheelchair through a quiet room. The image delivers the same feeling as a dark grey painting, lonely and despondent. He watches, lip quivering, as an ambulance pulls into his massive estate. Cut back an undetermined amount of time. Donald stands straighter. He maintains a kind of pride that must come with being one of the British elite, but he is grieving. He has a lot to grieve about.

    His wife, Lady Nancy Brocklebank, is terribly sick and probably won't be with him much longer. The bills are piling up, and they will soon lose their mansion. His son James (Leo Bill, in an over-the-top performance that works), dashes around the house with little clear purpose.

    James is in his mid-to-late twenties. He is stuck in a kind of permanent childhood, the kind of childhood that is made up of nightmares, not whimsy. Although Simon Rumley, the director, describes him as "mentally challenged," I suspect paranoid schizophrenia.

    James is by far my favorite character in the film. He is a complicated movie creation, and his emotional limitations do not hold back his complexity or ambiguity as a person. Donald treats James with the casual cruelty that is most likely inflicted on the mentally ill more often than we think, condescending to him, forbidding him to use the phone or answer the door. James is desperate to prove to his father that he is an independent adult and plans to do so by taking care of his mother.

   His father understandably rejects the idea. In an matter of days, James will have locked the door, shut out the nurse, skipped his pills, and may have destroyed the lives of those closest to him. Soon, as his lucidity deteriorates, the viewer begins to wonder if the past events were only in James' head. This is a film for a patient audience -- it's a while before anything happens and the reality of the events is questionable.

    The atmosphere is palpable, and the characters are well developed. There are many plot holes and unanswered questions throughout the film, as the story itself seems on the edge of reality, with its Gothic features and abstract images.

    People have had different opinions on whether James is "good" or "bad." He is a disturbing character, to be sure. He is not a sex maniac, mad slasher, or stony-faced killer, but an exceptionally childlike and deeply disturbed man. This movie might make you feel differently about a crime, in the paper, in which mental illness was a factor. Despite naysayers, The Living and the Dead is an emotional bombshell and thought-provoking film.