Once upon a time, the name Hammer meant something significant in horror film history – between the 1950s and early ‘70s, you could have accurately described some of the most campy, trashiest and entertaining monster films ever made as “Hammeresque,” from classic Universal re-tellings to science-fiction Quatermass adventures. However, the opening credits for Company’s “Doctor Jekyll” show that this year’s Hammer Films is not the same company that William Hinds and James Carreras had built it into over the years. In fact, while “Doctor Jekyll” benefits greatly from its central performance (with allusions to gender norms), everything else in this film betrays its lightweight quality.
Hammer has played around with Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved tale before – consider 1971’s “Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde,” which saw a potion twist Henry Jekyll into a lustful female alter ego. But then again Joe Stephenson, director of Chicken, and his screenwriter Dan Kelly-Mulhern did not put together an updated version of this story as a low-fi parlour room drama for nothing: they take too much time to build up suspense through campiness.
Mostly because of Eddie Izzard who does well here except for Blair Mowat’s delightfully outre, baroque score; she mesmerizes as Dr. Nina Jekyll. A new billionaire with an unknown illness that requires precise timing with her medication (I wonder what happens when she misses a dose?) hires Rob Stevenson (Scott Chambers—”Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2″) as her housekeeper after her stern handler Sandra gets overwhelmed; he is an ex-convict struggling to get his life back on track so he can see his daughter.
The first part of “Doctor Jekyll” seems like a perverse version of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread but on a low budget – in one, the tormented genius whiles away his days in an empty home and the other has a naïve muse caught up in his plots and a disciplinarian who looks down on both of them. However, in that sense there is no suspense about Jekyll’s real motives for having Rob come to work or what her condition is; as well as this, subplots dealing with things like motion-sensitive cameras, locked doors, and Rob’s junkie ex-wife flail around aimlessly before meeting their bloody ends.
To her credit, Izzard deftly handles the slim script like a pro and she accounts for about eighty percent of why someone should watch it all the way through. She has always been a great actor, but being able to so completely inhabit her transgender identity throughout these last few turns have opened up some astonishing new layers of performance. Prim yet commanding as Nina she tears into a bowl of “crunchy nutty cornflakes” with all the passion of eating steak. Rachel Hyde snicker-growls every single word of her dialogue with absolute camp divinity. It doesn’t have much to do with Shakespeare—ironically enough, considering she just came from doing Hamlet solo—but it is really enjoyable to play that part so much fun.
Mostly, it’s her fellow actors on stage who let her down. It is true that Lindsey Duncan pouts as well as anyone and gives the production a little Lesley Manville effect. For example, Chambers was never up to task of keeping up with any of his co-stars; he just floundered around shamelessly practicing his lines as though Freddie Highmore’s agent had switched off their phones.
Of course, one must pay attention to what “Jekyll” does concerning gender and transness – after all, the original story is about changing oneself into another person and thus revealing the hidden self within. By casting a trans woman as Jekyll in the first place, Stephenson complicates that narrative in ways both intriguing and befuddling. In other words, both Jekyll and Hyde are women in this version, with the split becoming less about her body (or his) and more about her morality. (A black-and-white flashback awkwardly connects Nina to the original Henry Jekyll but also amusingly establishes that “drug” that holds Hyde back comes from a cigarette which glows green when smoked. Talk about a hybrid strain.) However, before getting there I could not spoil this movie by mentioning some twists toward its end although I would be interested to hear opinions of other transgender viewers regarding this point.
At 90 minutes long though “Doctor Jekyll” can barely be faulted for being slow-paced. However it tends towards being too patient for its own sake often merely building towards an inevitable conclusion without giving us much else apart from Azzard and some cereal. The chance to mess up exploring the life of a late-onset-transitioning character through Mary Reilly’s eyes was stunning especially with someone like Azzard playing Dr.Jekyl . Still it veers too close to camp or character study without ever really landing either way successfully while momentarily implying in its final moments that your body should not belong to you no matter how you identify. That’s a troubling implication to unpack.
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