Chadwick Boseman, Teresa Palmer and Luke Evans star in this atmospheric revenge thriller from director Fabrice du Welz (Vinyan, Alléluia), about a mysterious traveller from South Africa combing the Los Angeles underworld for those responsible for the death of his sister.
Jacob King (Boseman) is a stranger in a strange land. Rather than basking in the fabled radiance of the City of Angels he drifts, Dante-like, through a sprawling, infernal cityscape of fiercely territorial tribalism and dog-eat-dog savagery. His sister has been killed. He wants answers. And he wants blood.
Scripted by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell (who also collaborated on Jaume Collet-Serra's Unknown), Message from the King smartly infuses Jacob's intensely personal quest with a wider sense of the seething racial tension and imminent violence coursing through the United States.
But it's Du Welz's elegant imagery, staging, and mastery of mood that sets the film apart (note, for only one instance, the chilling scene of Jacob's visit to the morgue), and the director also shrewdly draws upon his own sense of displacement as a European in America to cast an observant outsider's gaze on this endlessly filmed city.
Following in the footsteps of Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Outside Man, Terence Stamp in The Limey, and Takeshi Kitano in Brother, Boseman's anti-hero arrives in LA as if visiting another planet, alienated, disoriented, but grimly and single-mindedly fixated on his dark purpose — a mission from which he will not be deterred.
COLIN GEDDES
Screenings
Visa Screening Room (Elgin)
Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema
Scotiabank 14
Scotiabank 3