JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT SAFE TO GO BACK TO THE SALON
THE scheduled re-opening of hairdressing salons in April will give you time to watch The Stylist (★★★II), a gory thriller about a psychotic hairdresser, without worrying too much that your next layered bob might be your last.
Jill Gevargizian’s polished film features a fine lead performance from Najarra Townsend as Claire, who works in a Kansas City salon where her hairstyling skills are second to none, but mask an unhinged personality. Claire is lonely; her only social interaction is with her clients, who little suspect that the attractive redhead they see in the mirror is plotting to drug and scalp them.
One of Claire’s regulars, Olivia (Brea Grant) is about to get married. This leads to a bond of sorts, a growing obsession on Claire’s part and a creepy denouement to a film that isn’t exactly unblemished (in a city where a series of deaths and disappearances clearly point to a serial killer at work, you’d expect the local cops to be a tad more visible) but is nevertheless stylishly shot and classily acted.
THE OWNERS (★★III) is another thriller verging on horror, set in the English countryside. It is very nearly as gory as The Stylist but not remotely as good, despite the presence of young Game Of Thrones star Maisie Williams and a couple of screen veterans it’s always a pleasure to see, in Sylvester McCoy and Rita Tushingham.
They play a retired doctor and his dementia-stricken wife who return to their grand, secluded home one evening to find that it has been broken into by four young scoundrels, bent on robbing them.
The heavy-handed twist, far too predictable for this to count as a spoiler, is that the frail old home-owners gradually gain the upper hand over their assailants, turning out to be not at all what they seem.
THE LAST VERMEER (★★III) is about a series of 17th-century masterpieces that also are not what they seem. The film chronicles the remarkable true story of Dutch artist Han van Meegeren (Guy Pearce), one of whose ‘Vermeers’ was bought for a fortune by Hermann Goering, and the work of military investigator Joseph Piller (Claes Bang) in exposing him not as a traitor for selling the nation’s treasures to the Nazis — but as a forger.
Told in detail in the Mail last Saturday, it’s a thrilling tale which, alas, is given somewhat clunky treatment here, not helped by an uncharacteristically wooden, ill-at-ease performance from Bang, usually such a charismatic actor. n All three films are available on digital platforms from Monday.