The Show

 Alan Moore's kept busy after finally quitting comics a few years ago. He's put out a (great) book of short stories, might actually be finishing a long-in-gestation book on magic, and more importantly for our purposes here, he actually wrote and shepherded a full movie to production.

 The Show -a title so generic it's almost as if it's flipping two birds at search engines- is a wonderful trawl through Northampton's more psychedelic side, a noir yarn warped by Moore's acid-tinged surreal sense of humor. A suitably droll, very witty, hyper-literate sense of humor.

 A man (Tom Burke) arrives at Northampton looking for another man (Darrell D'Silva), one who beat his client's daughter and stole a precious heirloom. We'll mostly be following the former - goes by Steve Lipman, though his name changes often, as does his cover story - as he hits the streets and meets various colourful characters, slowly putting together a pulpy, twisty story that will lead to a confrontation with an East London mafioso and a sort of vaudeville act of the damned that seems to impose their reality upon our dreamscapes. Their apparent ringleader? A dead cult comedian called Frank Metterton, played by none other than Alan Moore hisself, made up to look like a crescent moon. Or a waning moon, I guess, depending on which side you look at him from.

 

 The story serves as an excuse for a lot of digressions and to parade a bunch of wonderful characters, but it isn't an afterthought. Unlike a lot of surrealist work the plotting here is loose but coherent, laced with dream-logic but sound enough to work within its chosen genre. And it builds up to near-traditional beats and payoffs, even while structurally it remains a shaggy dog story.
 There is so much to unpack here; As is usual with Moore's work, the whole thing is dense with detail, allusions, gags and homages. One thing I love about surrealist films is that it puts me in a mode where I'm constantly double-guessing myself, trying to work out some bit of incidental symbolism rather than plot mechanics- and in that sense this movie is a treasure trove. With all the references to dreams in the early going, I at first took Lipman's shirt to be a nod to Freddy Krueger, but no- it becomes clear later, with his choice of weapon, that he's actually meant to be the Beano's version of Dennis the Menace, all grown up. Does it mean anything? I'm not sure, maybe not - Moore's gone on record about reading a lot of those comics as a kid, so it might be just a homage. Is it positioning him as an agent of chaos, or further grounding all this weirdness in the working class? Possibly; It still got a huge laugh.

 The characters are so much fun: A pair of pre-pubescent gumshoes who come with their own black and white palette and speak their hard-boiled noir narration out loud (later, they do the two-kids on a trench coat gag.) A natty club doorman constantly contradicts himself and backtracks on everything he says. A brutally direct, standoffish woman gets some seriously funny lines in. There's also a Voodoo priestess drug dealer, a gravitas-laden superhero whose laptop is branded with his insignia... silly, silly stuff. That's not even counting Faith (Siobhan Hewlett), a very likeable near-fatal victim of erotic asphyxiation who becomes integral to the story early on.

 If it all sounds a bit too twee for you... well, it might well be; This is the sort of movie that will provoke a strong visceral rejection in a certain sort of moviegoer. But it's very well made. All the actors are having fun with their roles, the staging shows the limits of its budget but wears them well- and the production design is outstanding, filling the background with marginalia like an advert for 'Amityville and Usher, realtors' or a soap opera called Wittgenstein's terrace where a shouting match devolves into epistemological debate. Moore's frequent collaborator Mitch Jenkins shows a little flair where money allows but mostly remains unobtrusive, reserving his most striking shots to frame the characters in memorable ways.

 In something as wide-ranging as this, it's inevitable that some bits will fall flat. There is the one scene in particular - a nightmarish courtroom incident - which I found almost intolerable, the sort of terrible self-consciously arty and surreal dream sequence that that the rest of the movie skillfully avoids doing.

 Other than that, I really loved the film. Everyone involved is trying to get a TV show based on it off the ground, which hopefully will come to pass someday; There's also a series of shorts, now more than a decade old, which feature the same characters; I'll need to hunt them down now.

 No, it's not for everyone, but I couldn't be happier I found this.