The Messenger
The publicity would have you believe The Messenger is a supernatural horror thriller along the same lines as The Sixth Sense. Aside from the shared conceit of central characters who can see dead people, the two films couldn’t be more different. This isn’t a cheapo British knock-off but a high-quality piece of cinema masquerading as a genre movie.
The central character is Jack (Robert Sheehan), a disturbed young man on the fringes of society who sees the ghosts of recently deceased people – specifically those who have suffered sudden or traumatic deaths and who want to use him as a messenger to contact the loved ones they left behind. He finds himself turning up at funerals trying to pass on words from beyond the grave to grieving relatives, and often getting a kicking for his troubles.
As Jack says scornfully to the spirit of a man called Mark (Jack Fox): “An accident maybe? Which means you weren’t expecting it. You have unfinished business; stop me if I’m getting any of this wrong.” The trouble is, these ghosts won’t leave him alone until he agrees to help. Mark is desperate to tell his young widow Sarah (Tamsin Merchant) how much he loved her and that he didn’t commit suicide but was murdered.
We see Jack struggle to come to terms with the ‘gift’ that is wrecking his life and, because of his kindness of heart, the compulsion he feels to help. His problems have driven him apart from his family; the only person in his life – the only living one, at any rate – is his sister Emma (Lily Cole) who feels guilty about the life of luxury she leads thanks to her high-profile lawyer husband Martin. Coincidentally, Martin happens to be representing Mark’s widow Sarah throughout the police investigation, which is led by no-nonsense Glaswegian copper (is there any other kind?) DCI Keane.
As the film progresses you begin increasingly to wonder whether Jack’s clearly disturbed mind is a product of his visions or the source of them. He takes endless walks in lonely places, engaging in imagined conversations with a psychiatrist (Joely Richardson), never achieving resolution. It is here that the film begins to turn away from the supernatural stuff and move towards psychological drama and, consequently, where it starts to get even better.
We begin to learn more about Jack’s childhood: growing up without a father and with a largely absent mother; in and out of care; treated as a weirdo by the locals. He drinks heavily, and sells his prescription medication to the junkie downstairs. It’s made plain that the world does not want or value him, which is ironic since the netherworld clearly does. This contrast between the supernatural and the mundane is what makes the film work: I imagine it’s what a Ken Loach ghost story would be like.
Director David Blair evidently has a very good eye, because the film looks absolutely stunning – not an easy trick to pull off when your film is largely shot under railway bridges and in grotty bedsits and back alleys. He is able to pick out the visual details which say more than two pages of dialogue could: Jack walking home carrying his takeaway polystyrene tray; a curled up strip of medical tablets, all popped out of the foil. The subject matter is perhaps more naturally suited to a TV drama than the big screen, so it’s to Blair’s credit that he’s made of it a properly cinematic experience.
More than that, though, he knows how to draw performances from his actors and this, above all else, is why you should see the film. Robert Sheehan’s performance as Jack is the best I’ve seen in a British film this year; in fact, it’s the best performance I have seen in any film this year. It’s a part that requires the emotional vulnerability of someone like Ben Whishaw and the hard-nosed attitude of a Christopher Eccleston (these are two actors I admire tremendously, so when I say that on the strength of this performance Robert Sheehan is potentially right up there with them, I mean he is seriously good). It’s because Sheehan is so good that you care about Jack, and that is crucial to a film like this in which the narrative and emotional weight is carried almost entirely by one character.
If I have one gripe it’s that, as in so many films, the depiction of mental health care in this country seems out of sync with the reality. The mental health facilities in movies are always spotlessly clean, modern and clearly well-resourced, whereas anyone who has ever been unfortunate enough to have needed such care will tell you that the reality is quite different. But that’s nitpicking. Thanks to skilful direction and one truly outstanding performance, The Messenger is a gripping, insightful and profoundly moving film.