Greg Harwood: "War Criminals"

Who remembers Raffles? The moustache-twiddling counterpart to Sherlock Holmes; a thief with a monocle and breeches. Jonathan Green’s dark filtering of the character, the underpromoted-as-fuck Innocent Crimes (2010), takes the concept of the enigmatic housebreaker and ushers him into the 21st century, his rascally elegance given a paedo twist through the dumb young protege he’s grooming. So far, so Christopher Nolan’s first film Following (1998), but with classic-savvy composer Greg Harwood on board, Mr Wells (George Telfer) and his London are magnetic. Even the Thames looks vaguely swimmable in its shroud of piano scales and monochrome.

Mr Wells is what you might call a Jermyn Street burglar—dressing in waistcoats and billowing silk as he ransacks the panic rooms of suburbia—but there’s something more murky about this anti-hero’s past, something beyond kleptomania. Harwood sets up the doubts nicely, and “War Criminals” points to one possible origin, giving us a glimpse into Wells’ old life and glowing like warm TV valves (I’m talking to you, rememberers of wooden sets). As the cello kicks in all Assassination of Jesse James-like you get the sense of a conflicted personality: miserly as Radovan Karadzic one minute and then sneaking like a cartoon private dick skit. For a black-and-white soundtrack it feels oddly blue—the same colour as aspirin-proof hangovers—and helps take us into the brain of a city sociopath as he stupidly stops burgling for a minute. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a smart-suited sociopath as Christmas gets ready to bite? Only crap-suited fucks on commissional interest whose shoes are the root of their style.