Out of Blue review: this neo-noir murder mystery is far too oddball for its own good
Dir: Carol Morley. Cast: Patricia Clarkson, Toby Jones, Jonathan Majors, Mamie Gummer, James Caan, Jacki Weaver, Aaron Tveit. 15 cert, 109 mins
This New Orleans-set detective thriller from Carol Morley pulls off an undesirable yet weirdly impressive coup: the twist ending to its murder mystery is somehow simultaneously preposterous and obvious, like a clown car parping and swerving its way towards you from the far end of an airstrip.
Morley is the British director best known for her quasi-documentary Dreams of a Life and the creepy girls’-school-set psychological mystery The Falling. Out of Blue – a very loose adaptation of the Martin Amis novel Night Train – is no less ambitious or singular than either of those projects.
Unfortunately, its odd mix of hard-boiled noir and cod-metaphysical waffle comes together in a way that defies you to take any of it seriously, from the trippy graphic interludes that recall 1990s screensavers, to its suspects who have alibis like: “We were up all night discussing Schrödinger’s Cat.”
Patricia Clarkson stars as the relentlessly morose Detective Mike Hoolihan, who’s investigating the murder of Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer), a Hitchcock-blonde astrophysicist found beside her favourite telescope with her face blown off. The corpse reminds a police colleague of the work of a long-vanished serial killer, but for Mike it triggers a flashback to some murky half-memory she can’t quite summon up.
Nevertheless, two possible culprits instantly emerge: the victim’s intense boyfriend (Jonathan Majors) and her cagey colleague (Toby Jones). But Mike’s consultations with Jennifer’s parents suggest there’s something stranger afoot, not least because her father (James Caan), a war veteran and local business magnate, carries himself like a wannabe Noah Cross, the villain in Chinatown. (Jacki Weaver, who plays the highly strung mother, has a line about nose-tweaking that recalls the famous knife-to-nostril scene in Roman Polanski’s film.)
Like many of the big-name neo-noirs in whose echoing footsteps Out of Blue tries to follow – not just Chinatown, but Night Moves, The Long Goodbye, even Inherent Vice – the initial mystery gives way to a broader inquiry into a more sinister systemic evil, which is notionally zhuzhed up with unconvincing musings on black holes, dark matter and stardust.
The result feels outsider-ish in the worst possible way: its grasp of metaphysics is as wobbly as its command of genre mechanics, while its New Orleans backdrop is bafflingly bland. Mike’s quest to piece together a dead woman’s secrets obviously recalls Dreams of a Life, in which Morley herself tried to do the same for Joyce Vincent, a London woman whose remains were only discovered two years after she died.
My advice to anyone remotely intrigued by this film is to watch that one instead.
