Is there any voice in modern British cinema more singular or distinctive than that of Carol Morley? From the confessional revelations of The Alcohol Years, through the heart-breaking docudrama of Dreams of a Life, to the spine-tingling swoon of The Falling, Morley has proved herself an unflinchingly adventurous film-maker – what Werner Herzog would call “a good soldier for cinema”. In her latest film, her most ambitious to date, she takes a neo-noir murder mystery and turns it into a quasi-metaphysical rumination upon life, the universe and everything. It’s a feat she undertakes with the gusto of one who is unafraid to fall, conjuring a trail of iridescent movie magic as she sets her sights on the stars.
“You can tell a lot by looking,” says astrophysicist Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer), a phrase that reverberates throughout this shimmering puzzle, matched and mirrored by the haunting strains of Brenda Lee singing I’ll Be Seeing You. After a cosmic opening that recalls Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, we pan down to Earth, to the blue dome of an observatory split by a shaft of red light.
Here, Rockwell, an authority on black holes with a fondness for vintage clothes, asks her audience: “Do you know your place in the universe? Do you know where you are?” A few hours later she will be lying on the cold observatory floor, her blue dress (spotted like the night sky) juxtaposed against the blood that pools around her head.
Jennifer’s violent death bears the hallmarks of the .38 Caliber Killer, a serial murderer from the past. Leading the case is Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson), the hardboiled detective who “never gets affected” by her job. But something about this case gets under her skin, provoking dizzy spells and fainting fits, like a killer dose of Stendhal syndrome.
Prime suspects include Duncan Reynolds (Jonathan Majors), an academic obsessed by parallel universes, and the anagrammatically named Dr Ian Strammi (Toby Jones), abscessed and anxious. Elsewhere in the constellation of characters are Jennifer’s family: jittery mother, Miriam (Jacki Weaver); war-hero father, Colonel Tom (James Caan); and twin brothers Bray and Walt (Todd and Brad Mann).
A recovering alcoholic with no memory of her childhood, Mike seems to be teetering on the brink of some awful realisation. It’s a quality captured by Clarkson’s enigmatic performance, a gravelly mix of clarity and wooziness. How fitting that this should all be playing out in New Orleans, described by one resident as “the city that forgot”. Appropriate, too, that Mike’s investigation matches Jennifer’s quest to follow a “trail of clues leading closer and closer to this black hole’s dark heart”. Both have been searching for answers; one looking up, one looking down, neither looking inward.
Originally earmarked for adaptation by Nicolas Roeg (whose son, Luc, co-produces), Martin Amis’s 1997 source novel, Night Train, has been radically reconfigured by Morley, who set out to “rescue the characters from the pages” of the book. What begins as a crime thriller becomes a meditation upon duality, characterised by a chromatic tension between two key colours: the red of Jennifer’s silk sash; the talismanic blue bead on Mike’s necklace; the red leather interiors of a car; the blue-grey hues of a police station. The narrative may be shaded by noir, but this is film bleu et rouge.
For attentive audiences, clues are everywhere, from a recurrent visual motif of freeways intersecting to a passing conversational reference to detectives leading “a double life”. Even the brand name of a tub of moisturising cream found at the scene of the crime – Hydra – invokes the serpent whose many heads reminds us that “ours may just be one of many universes”. Certainly, there’s a suggestion that Out of Blue is playing out in more than one reality at once. Like Schrödinger’s cat (the subject of a recurrent joke), could Jennifer be both dead and alive?
Some critics have compared Out of Blue to Chinatown and Donnie Darko, while Morley has cited touchstones as diverse as Blue Steel, The Singing Detective and Meshes of the Afternoon. I thought I saw echoes of Alan Parker’s Angel Heart amid the kaleidoscopic influences, which are brilliantly woven together by Clint Mansell’s superb score. Electrifying ambient tones and falling notes cross with splashy jazz beats, counterpointing Alex Mackie’s evocative editing of Conrad W Hall’s handsome cinematography.
Like all of Morley’s films, Out of Blue has some ragged edges that may alienate unsympathetic viewers. But having now seen the film three times, I find myself loving it all the more for its imperfections. When a film-maker aims this high, how can one do anything but watch in wonder?
