THORNE: SCAREDYCAT (TVA, 2010) D: Benjamin Ross, w/ David Morrissey, Tom Brooke. Rating: NNN DVD package: none Rating: NNN
Thorne: Scaredycat starts slow and has an undistinguished visual style, so for the first half-hour it looks like a nothing-special English police procedural. Then the complications start piling up and the tension rises.
A woman is battered to death in East End London. Then another is killed, not too far away and by a similar but not identical method. Those cases are linked to an old pair of same-day stabbings. One killer? Two? The evidence is inconclusive.
There’s nothing cozy or heroically hard-boiled in any of this. David Morrissey makes Detective Inspector Thorne awkward and cold. He’s disliked by his colleagues and superiors. Sandra Oh gives a similarly hard-edged performance as one of Thorne’s team.
Our sympathies might go to Martin Palmer, the prime suspect, but Tom Brooke’s character is so sunk in abject, snivelling terror that even this is denied us.
Morrissey plays Thorne in another movie: Sleepyhead. It sounds just as creepy as this one.
EXTRAS English, French audio. No subtitles.
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