A classy whodunit
Under suspicion (M)
Writer-director Simon Moore
Starring Laura San Giacomo, Liam Neeson
Reviewed by Mario Giorgetti
In England during the late 1950s, where vicious criminals were still likely to be sentenced to hang, homosexuality was illegal, and a divorce was not easy to get without clear proof of infidelity, some smart "entrepreneurs" found ways of getting around the law and made money in the process.
Tony Aaron (Liam Neeson), a private detective and disgraced former policeman, is the protagonist of this fast-moving mystery-thriller. Tony makes a dubious living by manufacturing proof of adultery for clients who want a divorce, putting his wife in the role of the other woman and photographing her and the client together in obviously adulterous poses.
All seems routine and ho-hum, but as with all complicated scams, something eventually is bound to go wrong. One night on a routine set-up to photograph his wife in bed with an Italian painter, the unthinkable happens: as Tony enters the hotel room to take the usual compromising photo, he finds himself photographing the scene of a brutal murder. As the case involves Carlo Stasio (Michael Almaz), a famous Italian painter who signs his work with his thumb-print for authenticity, it gets a lot of press, and Tony soon becomes the prime suspect in a bizarre and seemingly insoluble case of double murder. As the noose tightens, it looks more and more as if the set-up artist, too smart for his own good, has himself been set up to take the fatal fall into the hangman's pit.
Frantically, Tony, a hopeless womaniser with a bad record as an incompetent cop, casts about ineffectually to try to prove his innocence and in the process becomes entangled in the web of a femme fatale (Laura San Giacomo), the painter's former mistress. Here Under Suspicion finds echoes in Body Heat (a reworking of Double Indemnity) where the unwary protagonist, always looking for a quick score, falls victim to a sexual lure and seems bent on self-incrimination.
No genre of fiction depends so vitally on plot as does the mystery, and in this directorial debut, writer-director Simon Moore proves that he can control plot with uncommon skill on film as well as on paper, creating one of the most intriguing British whodunits of recent years. There are enough complications, plot twists and red herrings to put us off discovering the solution to this clever mystery until the end when all (well, almost all) is revealed.