Red Joan * (2018, Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Stephen Campbell Moore, Tom Hughes) – Movie Review

Director Trevor Nunn’s spy drama Red Joan (2018) lacks credibility and style as it plods through the real-life story of English-born Joan Stanley, who was living happily as a pensioner when she was exposed as the KGB’s longest-serving British spy, recruited in the mid Thirties. A Soviet and communist party sympathiser, the female scientist is nevertheless employed as a British government civil servant.

The film flashes back and forth listlessly from the old Joan (Judi Dench) to the young Joan (Sophie Cookson). Neither half of the film properly engages, involves or informs. The Cookson half must be the better, leaving the Dench half undynamic and the actress stranded in a passive role, just there to look gloomy and shocked as she is arrested and interrogated.

Even so, though the period re-creations are probably meticulous, they feel fake. It is all very theatrical and actory. There is an impression that it is a good story, but writer Lindsay Shapero does not find a way of convincing the audience of that idea in her thin and simplistic screenplay. The film would have its work cut out to make Joan Stanley the sympathetic heroine of this film, as she was a traitor who transferred nuclear bomb secrets Russia, but it tries to, unsuccessfully, seeming to suggest that she was a guardian of Western liberty.

Dame Judi seems awfully down and depressed, though to be fair that is the part. Cookson is all jolly hockey sticks, and way too up. It is hard to believe in either of them. There is little the actresses can do. Stephen Campbell Moore and Tom Hughes have a fair old lot to do, but are not at their best either.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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