FRANKLYN

E1 FILMS

RELEASED 27 February 2009

Telling a story set equally between London and the steampunk fantasy parallel world of Meanwhile City, ‘Franklyn’ sees three London-set characters converge in bizarre circumstances. Emilia (Eva Green) is a depressed art student intent on shock tactics, Milo (Sam Riley) is a jilted groom who decides to look up his old childhood friend Sally, and Peter Esser (Bernard Hill) is looking for his son, recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. Meanwhile, assassin Preest (Ryan Phillippe) skulks around the religion-dominated Meanwhile City, looking for an individual known as ‘the individual’, who Preest claims has killed his sister.

Reminiscent of alternate-reality movie ‘Dark City’, ‘Franklyn’ seems to make little sense for much of the movie, and it’s unclear what the four different plot strands have to do with each other, but as you reach the conclusion, it all wraps up very neatly and satisfyingly. You can view the film either as a psychological study or as a fantasy movie, and although obviously only having a small budget, ‘Franklyn’ has a dark and elegant steampunk look to the Meanwhile City enviroments, with gothic towers reaching to the heavens amongst the steam and smoking chimneys. The London scenes are nicely filmed too, with more unconventional locations than the usual ‘gerkin/LondonEye/red bus’ combination. ‘Franklyn’ also has more ideas in it’s fibre than most expensive blockbusters would dream of incorporating.

Of the cast, Ryan Phillipe convinces as the mysterious Preest, wearing a scary white mask with huge black eyes for most of the movie, making it quite a challenging performance to engage with the audience, which he does mainly with a noir voiceover. Eva Green plays a messed-up, lost girl on the verge of self-destruction extremely well, and she’s as sexy and alluring here as she was in her big Bond role. 

Writer/director Gerald McMorrow has crafted an interesting movie that should be applauded for it’s ambition, and while it’s big screen outing will probably get overshadowed by the bigger (and heavily marketed) Hollywood movies, it may well build a cult following in the years to come on DVD.

THREE OUT OF FIVE