DVD of the week

A Bigger Splash (R16)

Ralph Fiennes is Harry Hawkes, a British record producer with a gift of the gab and a bottomlessly colourful past, who arrives on Pantelleria to visit his old flame Marianne (Tilda Swinton) and her boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts). Accompanying him is Penelope (Dakota Johnson), a young American woman who may or may not be his long-lost daughter.

With a bit more restraint, A Bigger Splash could have had the elegant menace of a Patricia Highsmith novel. But Italian director Luca Guadagnino goes to town with studiously excessive stylistic flourishes: rapid zooms and dolly shots, flash pans in Wes Anderson’s manner, stabs of over-dramatic music.