Dir. Hadi Hajaig, UK, 2005, 93 mins
Cast: Nick Moran, Georgina Rylance, David Soul
Review by Richard Mellor
As traumatised strings sound in the background and opening credits appear scrawled in an old-fastioned calligraphic style, so Puritan’s opening camera shot pans over a mildewy map of Whitechapel and its environs. The stage is set for a classy exploration of London’s spooky streets and historic legends…
… That is, until you realise that the map is actually a fuzzy A to Z, just shot in a yellowish hue. The music and fine penmanship promptly stop; in their place come Nick Moran, tired plot devices and a predictable love affair. The locale is that of a previous Moran movie, Lock, Stock… - but the subject matter is vastly different.
Hadi Hajaig’s feature-length debut follows Moran’s eponymous hero down an increasingly precarious path. A failed writer-turned-medium, Simon Puritan’s lamentable life is suddenly spiced up by a suspiciously-enraptured piece of posh totty, a clairvoyant stranger covered in burns and a shifty-looking business think tank shrouded in secrecy.
Combine such surprises with agonising headaches and a fascination with all things supernatural and Puritan is, handily for Hajaig’s thriller, a man on the edge – literally so at one point, as he wobbles on a tube station precipice while an onrushing train approaches. This sets the tone for the film’s paranormal preoccupations.
To wit: Puritan resides in a home with a hairy history – occultist worship, apparitions and a grisly murder have all occurred in a building supposedly erected by pagan architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. Delighted at such hocus pocus, Puritan begins to believe in a fourth dimension of human consciousness, one where stepping into the past or future is inherently possible.
Amid the urban scenery of London, these gothic elements are exhilarating, echoing the tone of novels by Christopher Fowler or various Jack the Ripper walking tours. But they are rather undermined by a hackneyed love triangle starring Puritan, a loathsome husband (David Soul) crying out to be killed and an increasingly demanding and unreliable femme fatale in adulterous Anne (Georgina Rylance).
In yet another story strand, Soul hams it up for all he’s worth as the leader of the highly-mysterious think tank, promising to purge the world of evil but sounding terribly vicious himself. Hajaig’s problem is thus one of over-ambition: his attempts to cram Hawksmoor history, evil corporations, psychological theories, crimes of passion and time travel into 90 minutes inevitably lead to many an abruptly-severed subplot.
With so many motifs running parallel, Hajaig is forced to hurry his film along as the ending nears, ruining the pace of what had begun to be a gently gripping tale. Eventually, all that hinders Hajaig’s bid for brevity are the incredibly slow, plodding lines uttered by the mumbling Moran, less method and more maddeningly methodical as the irksome hero.
But despite its stagnant lead and a terminal feel of tackiness, Puritan the film thrusts forward so much vim, vigour and verve that you simply have to embrace it, right through from those opening credits to a remarkably preposterous ending. It’s high on energy, low on brilliance but crucially, full of fun.
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