Mark Reviews Movies: ROGUE AGENT

Rogue Agent, IFC Films

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 11, 2022

Rogue Agent dramatizes the true-life story of Robert Hendy-Freegard, a mysterious man who seems to come out of nowhere and with no sense of history or personality during the movie's prologue. He remains that way throughout the movie, for reasons that are both sound and frustrating. We don't need to know the details of this man, who caused so much emotional pain and financial disaster to so many people, or his life, which really just became about his methods of manipulation.

Any attempt by the filmmakers to examine Hendy-Freegard's psychology or otherwise explain his motives easily would be to try to understand him. With understanding comes some degree of sympathy, and there's none that should be aimed in his direction. As a detective in the movie puts it, all crimes are perpetrated by someone's who's "mad, sad, or bad." By all accounts, this guy falls into that rare final category.

Where, though, does that leave this movie? Co-writers/co-directors Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson (who also penned the screenplay with Michael Bronner, based on an article he wrote on the subject) present it as a mystery that becomes a mind game, before it finally arrives at a race-against-the-clock thriller. The focus is exclusively on the victims here—mostly women who fall for this villain's charms and then fall into the trap of his actual goal. While that's the proper and morally sensible approach to telling this particular story, it also feels like it's touching upon the bare minimum of exploring the consequences of this man's sick game—just as the plotting comes across as the bare minimum of how such a tale of deception can be structured.

The prologue, set in 1993, follows Robert (James Norton), a man who arrives in a college town in England one day, takes a job as a bartender, and spends some time observing the locals and their customary behavior. The narrator of Robert's general outlook on and approach to his methods will become the protagonist soon enough.

She's Alice Archer (Gemma Arterton), a fictionalized amalgamation of some of Hendy-Freegard's victims, and the methods, as she describes them, mainly amount to making—or at least faking—genuine connections and telling people the story they want to hear. For the trio of college students who become Robert's first targets in this story, that narrative is that he's an MI5 and that they could help him catch IRA members planning an attack.

Nine years later, Alice, an attorney, meets Robert, currently selling luxury cars at a shop near her home, when he tries flirting with her on the sidewalk. She feels bad about shooting down his approach, and soon enough, the two start going out, eating in, and becoming quite intimate. She has a private investigator look into Robert, and when it turns out that he's basically an official "ghost," he tells Alice the same story he told those college students. It all adds up for her and—since we only have what he says by which to judge the guy—for us, too. When Robert starts talking about starting a business with Alice, she's all too happy to entertain the idea of leaving a job with which she's none too happy.

The rest of this has Alice discovering that Robert is nothing that he says he is, delving into his past criminal activity, and becoming obsessed with facing him one last time. Arterton is strong here, even if her character feels like a contradiction—both a cynic of strong will and naïve enough to ignore her suspicions about the guy—invented to keep her involved in the entirety of the plot. Meanwhile, Norton possesses the kind of charm that could sell these lies, while also offering a chilling view of how Robert is a shell of charisma housing a vacancy of humanity.

The problem, perhaps, is that, in the way the filmmakers reduce it to the basics of investigatory work and a manhunt, this story falls into a pattern of familiarity and misery. We learn what happened to those college students from the prologue, with only one of them becoming truly free of Robert's invented story (Marisa Abela, as a woman who's still convinced she's a freelance government operative, and Freya Mavor, as another woman who's still connected to Robert in another way, play the other two). Sarah Goldberg plays Jenny, an American woman who becomes Robert's next target.

There's no real sense of insight into Robert's methods or, since they're all defined by what the man has done or is doing to them, compassion for his victims. That they're primarily women is a fact of the real-life case, but their portrayal here—apart from Alice, whose later actions of hunting Robert feel like an act of compensation—is so shallow that it borders on exploitation.

All of them are just part of the plot of Rogue Agent, which moves forward competently and with an increasing sensation of discomfort as the history and scope of Robert's crimes become clearer. It certainly gives us a sense of how awful this man is, but again, that just feels like the bare minimum.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)