Keeping Rosy **** (2014, Maxine Peake, Blake Harrison) – Movie Review

Maxine Peake (The Village, Silk, The Hollow Crown) stars as Charlotte, a career-obsessed workaholic whose world suddenly crashes when she quits her high-flying London media agency job after being betrayed in the boardroom and passed over for promotion, only to come home early to find her foreign maid and cleaner Mykala (Elisa Lasowski) smoking in her swanky apartment.

The two start a row, with Charlotte motoring on a thoughtless, misplaced rage that leads her to a reckless moment. In the cold light of realising the danger, she reacts efficiently and capably but her life disintegrates further when she tries to cover up CCTV evidence and meets violent, psychopathic security guard Roger, played by Blake Harrison (The Inbetweeners).

Peake does very well in a peach of a role for any actress, using her hair to great dramatic effect at key moments. It’s a great piece of hair acting. Often without much dialogue to go on, Peake really does pull you into her character’s upset, angst and derangement along the way to self-discovery and atonement. She treads nobly in the footsteps of the great Joan Crawford, who would almost certainly have landed this role in Hollywood 50 years ago.

Harrison does well too in the tricky role of the guard, avoiding overplaying it, either the psycho element of it or the London lowlife element. Christine Bottomley makes a decent job of playing the less rewarding but key role of Charlotte’s sister Sarah, who comes down from the north with her kid to help her out in her crisis. 

This commendably tense and compelling psychological independent thriller is the film directorial debut of award-winning ad director Steve Reeves, who has helmed over 400 commercials but is best known for his Agent Provocateur advertisement starring Kyle Minogue, which has an incredible 360 million hits on the web.

With the carefully drafted script by Reeves and Mike Oughton, the neo-noir-style story’s nice and dark and twisted, with lots of well-placed surprises and a few heart-racing moments.

Academy Award nominated director of photography Roger Pratt (Harry Potter, The End of the Affair) makes both the film and London look chilly but interesting and eye-catching.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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