REVIEW: London Road

London Road (dir. Rufus Norris, 2015)
****

I absolutely adore Rufus Norris’ debut feature film Broken, so from early on I was very excited to see his next film, London Road. Today – way later than I would’ve liked to – I got to finally see it and Norris didn’t let me down.

I’m very surprised of how low ratings this movie has: it’s only 5,3/20 on IMDb. The reviews are polarized. It seems like the whole basis of the movie is too much for some to handle: London Road tells a real story of community that’s getting over horrible serial murders of five prostitutes, based on interviews of the locals. By the way, it’s a musical.

I feel like it’s mainly just that musicals are stereotyped as feel good, silly, overly dramatic. Definitely not the right way to process such serious (and recent, the murders taking place in 2006) matters. In addition to underestimating musicals, the viewers stubbornly close their eyes from the fact that the movie is not really about the murders; it’s about the community of London Road.

What’s really refreshing about the movie is the way it shows just regular people. It’s definitely not Broadway styled big show; the songs are based on what those real people said in interviews. It’s brilliant play with speech patterns and intonations more than actual singing. Stutter and erms are included so it actually sounds more natural than in many movies where the character pop pretty perfectly shaped sentences out of their mouth so effortlessly all the time. What comes to choreographies, they are based on coordinated movement to build the tension. I personally really dig that kind of styling as film really has no need to follow the reality faithfully.

By telling the story of the local people, the movie didn’t leave out the ones left outside of the community: the local prostitutes. It took the story to a new level, I even got goosebumps few times: the scene of the girls speaking about how it took the murders to make people want to help them, and then in near end when Julie (Olivia Colman) told the interviewer that she would want to thank the murderer of getting rid of the prostitutes, next to her sleeping daughter.

What I really did not like about this movie was the not-so-subtle symbolic color schemes. The greyish blue of the beginning was just not visually appealing, it felt too underlined and too pushed forward. Otherwise the cinematography and editing was really on point though. All in all, London Road is a bold, sharp and respectful but interesting movie. Rufus Norris is a great storyteller, I would love to see his work also on stage (and keep my fingers crossed for more movies too).