COLD LIGHT OF DAY
Dir. Fhiona Louise, 1989.
United Kingdom. 80 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 - MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 - MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 - 10PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 - MIDNIGHT

Bob Flag, who bears a striking resemblance to the real Dennis Nilsen, plays Jordan Marsh, a seemingly kindly civil servant who befriends down and out young men and lures them back to his “flat of horror” (as it was dubbed at the time by the tabloid press) with promises of food, drink and shelter only to strangle them with a necktie, drown them in his bathtub and dismember their bodies in a film based on the crimes of Dennis Nilsen.

This fictionalized account of the Nilsen murders dramatizes key elements of his modus operandi. Flag plays Nilsen with quiet menace and pathetic confusion, as a diseased man unable to comprehend his affliction or explain his drive to kill. Written and directed by 21-year-old Fhiona Louise in her first and only directorial credit (still the youngest woman to have directed a feature film in Britain), it is a strangely observational look at the daily rituals and routines of a life turned toward killing.

Shot on grainy 16mm film on a micro budget, in the grottiest of flats, caffs, pubs, and in the red light district of Soho, it is a film of unrelenting bleakness and suffocating grayness, offering an oblique insight into a disturbed criminal mind in the cold light of Thatcher’s London.