Kills Me Dead

The story unfolds as a mystery/thriller rife with “who’s that lurking round the corner” shots as we slowly unravel who are the players are and who is on what side of the argument. The problem with this movie is, though, that it sort of skims along the surface of the politics and is more focused on the drama spent convincing the protagonist, Anne, that she’s crazy and that her family is not involved in the conspiracy. It’s kind of a waste, considering this is an icky side of World War II politics that you rarely see in film and so you leave wishing it had been explored more.

It reminded me a lot in places of The Good Shepherd with all the covert operations designed to procure a specific outcome to the war and the paranoia and career ruin that comes with it when there is a single misstep, but it failed to engage me in the same way, specifically because Anne is supposed to be left entirely in the dark and to only come upon information as it becomes necessary as part of the plot. We don’t see enough of the collusion or enough of the political dominoes to really get a sense of the magnitude of the impact appeasement will have on Britain and the continent.

I’m not convinced that mystery/thriller is the genre for this story.

Fast forward to what happens once Anne finds out too much information. Her family hold her captive in their London home, drugging her food to keep her fuzzy and thinking she’s physically ill rather than being on the brink of figuring out their conspiracy. Eventually her ineffectual mother apparently leaves the door unlocked and Anne simply walks out of the house and down the street, where at a park she runs into her captors who speak to her nonchalantly and don’t seem distraught at all that she’s clearly escaped their clutches. At this point, I thought she had died from lack of nourishment and that this was a death dream like at the end of Titanic, where she was coming face to face with her now dead family in order to turn her back on them and escape in death the way she could not in life. Except then we come back to the present where the grandson drags his grandmother’s cousins to Ye Olde Retirement Home round the corner where his mother is pushing an old woman in a wheel chair. Naturally, the old woman is Anne and — contrary to the old codgers’ belief that she died in Canada twenty years previous — she’s been in England the whole time! And, more importantly, that she apparently sent her sister’s grandson to get the story of what happened to Anne from the cousins so she could hear them say it in their own words, as if she is personally holding them responsible for the atrocities her family inflicted on her. Nevermind that the elder of the two was like nine when it happened. WTF.