CLASS CONFLICT
I CAME BY Graffiti artists target a former judge with a secret in Babak Anvari’s neo-noir thriller.
With Under The Shadow and Wounds, British-Iranian filmmaker Babak Anvari announced himself as a bracingly fresh voice in the supernatural horror genre. But there’s more than one string to Anvari’s fearsome bow, as evidenced by I Came By, a “Hitchcockian neo-noir crime thriller” that also proves the British film industry doesn’t make them like it used to.
“I find it interesting that we’ve lost touch with the whole Hitchcockian genre in Britain,” Anvari tells Teasers just a week after delivering a film five years in the making. “So it’s really exciting for me to take inspiration from the master and try to do something in that vein, in modern times.”
Set in contemporary inner-city London, the film stars George MacKay as Toby and Percelle Ascott as Jay, graffiti artists and income-inequality avengers who break into the homes of the city’s wealthy elite only to tag their walls with a three-word insignia – ‘I Came By’ – before slipping away into the night.
“It’s to tell the elites, ‘We’re watching you. Don’t think you can get away with stuff,’” says Anvari, who sees in graffiti writing a “creative and subversive” way to challenge the system. “They’re doing it, in their head, for a cause.”
That cause makes them outsiders even among the grafitti-writing community, who refer to artists who break the code by breaking and entering as ‘toys’. Anvari first had the idea for
I Came By in his early twenties, when he was no stranger to rudderless young men like hot-headed Toby.
“He’s basically just a hyper-angry rebel, until things happen that put things into perspective for him, and he realises that he has to act,” says Anvari, who was loosely inspired by David Hemmings’ fashion photographer in Antonioni’s Blowup when conceiving Toby. “That it’s not just about putting paint on a wall, and being rebellious.”
The turning point comes when Jay scopes out the pair’s next fat-cat target: former judge Hector, played by Hugh Bonneville. Cast somewhat against type, Bonneville’s well-connected Hector has stepped away from work under dubious circumstances that eventually put Toby, Jay and their families (including Toby’s mum, played by Kelly Macdonald) in serious danger.
“From the moment we created Hector, we wanted to make sure that you don’t immediately have these ideas of: ‘We know where this is going’,” says Anvari, who co-wrote the script with Namsi Khan. “We wanted Hector to be this very charming, platonic sort of Englishman. Very polite, very wellbehaved, very measured – but then who obviously is hiding a mystery and a darkness.”
Shot across London, it’s a film that presents two sides of the city – the wealthy in mega-mansions who can clear up any legal trouble with a phone call to a friendly superintendent, and the less privileged for whom the police are more of a hindrance than a help – neither of which is the postcard version of the capital. “It’s a London film,” says Anvari, a city boy himself. “It was always meant to be on the ground, looking at London, with the characters.”
In a move out of the Hitch playbook, the film’s perspective switches back and forth throughout as the story unfolds, making it a true ensemble thriller with some wildly unpredictable left turns. “That was the exciting part of it for me, and why it took a bit of time to really figure out the script,” Anvari notes. “It was a proper jigsaw puzzle. I learned a lot doing it, in terms of storytelling. I really hope it delivers.” Come by, you won’t be disappointed.
I CAME BY OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 19 AUGUST AND ON NETFLIX FROM 31 AUGUST.