DOCTOR JEKYLL - Mark Reviews Movies

Doctor Jekyll, Hammer Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 1, 2024

You don't call a movie Doctor Jekyll and expect that we won't know what's going in it. That's one of the key issues with Dan Kelly-Mulhern's screenplay, which plays it coy with its version of Robert Louis Stevenson's creation, a scientist who concocts a serum that allows him to become someone else—a darker version of himself—in order to hide his baser impulses. The story of Jekyll and Hyde is common knowledge, so much so that the use of either name or both in combination is part of the common parlance.

It's not much of a surprise, then, to learn that Kelly-Mulhern's variation, a reclusive pharmaceutical company executive, has a secret dual identity. What is a surprise, though, is how long it takes for this story to directly address the one fact about this tale that we know even before the title arrives.

The character of Jekyll, not to mention the other one, is played by Eddie Izzard, adding the most significant twist to this modernized pseudo-adaptation of Stevenson's novella. In this one, Jekyll is a transgender woman, a fact announced in newspaper headlines during the opening credits and, then, somewhat-admirably accepted by everyone in the movie. The character's gender identity is simply a bit of trivia and background for her, and the same goes here for the presence of Izzard, who has been public about the fluidity of her gender for decades and gets to play a role that's founded in that idea.

Those who know Izzard's work might have no small amount of anticipation of what the actor could do with these dual roles, as Nina Jekyll and, eventually, Rachel Hyde. The result is a disappointment, although little of that has to do with her. Like everyone and everything else here, Izzard is hampered by the material's hesitation to do, well, much of anything with the character of Jekyll/Hyde until the third act, when it simply throws the double personas into a standoff filled with some violence and a couple of twists.

The main character is actually Rob (Scott Chambers), who had been released from prison on drug charges a few weeks prior to meeting him. He's currently living his older brother Ewan (Morgan Watkins) and desperate to find a job, so that he can finally meet and have some relationship with his daughter, who was born while he was incarcerated and is now in the care of social services. The baby is grievously ill, too, making his goal all the more necessary.

A job opportunity comes his way, and it's serving as a live-in caretaker for Nina, who walks with a cane and has a daily regimen of meals and medications to maintain. The doctor's assistant Sandra (Lindsay Duncan) is skeptical of the young man, but Nina appreciates his honesty and, it seems, his desperation to hold a job—no matter what it may be and might entail.

Most of the plot becomes a lot of wheel-spinning. Rob starts to realize that something is off about his new employer, who has sudden shifts in mood and opinion, and the isolated manor she calls home. One of Nina's mantras—or so it would seem to be hers—is keeping two steps ahead of things, but how many steps ahead are we of the mystery attempted by Kelly-Mulhern and director Joe Stephenson?

The filmmakers embrace some of the audience's intrinsic foreknowledge of the basics of this story, although it's mostly in the most obvious of ways. Rob starts sneaking around and snooping about the mansion, inspecting the doctor's office and finding a locked room—from the outside, oddly. His curiosity is inevitably interrupted by another character, and Stephenson accompanies the abrupt appearance with an almost-deafening cacophony on the soundtrack. It's not a promising sign that greatest act of violence for a while here might be perpetrated against our eardrums, especially since the story involves a character—or half of one, technically—whose murderous ways have been part of the cultural landscape for almost a century and a half at this point.

Anyway, Rob wanders some more and learns of a scheme being organized by his ex-girlfriend, the mother of the baby, Maeve (Robyn Cara) to rob the mansion. Nina continues having her mood swings, turning from deeply sympathetic of Rob's circumstances to entirely dismissive of or somewhat aggressive toward her caretaker, and we're just left to wait around for the inevitable revelation of the one thing we know for certain.

When that finally arrives in Doctor Jekyll, Izzard does bring some degree of the tragic to Nina and some broad flare of the malevolent to her alter-ego. It's far too little, much too late, and with a significant feeling of anticlimax in a story we already know from the title alone.

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