Sleeping Dogs: Russell Crowe is back to his best
Everyone is a suspect in this film. And each one of them remembers more about the lead-up to a murder than disgraced detective Roy Freeman – played by Russell Crowe – as he battles Alzheimer’s.
The murder mystery Sleeping Dogs is Russell Crowe’s best film for a while. It’s an old fashioned whodunit that reminds me of Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard, which opens with a man floating face down in a swimming pool and uses flashbacks to reveal how he ended up that way.
I’m not for a moment suggesting Sleeping Dogs is as good as Sunset Boulevard but it is an improvement on recent Crowe movies such as The Pope’s Exorcist and The Exorcism.
I will reveal one of the mysteries without the need for a spoiler alert. The film is set in Pennsylvania but was shot in Melbourne with a primarily Australian cast. It is based on The Book of Mirrors (2017), the first English language novel by popular Romanian crime writer EO Chrirovici.
It’s the directorial debut of American screenwriter Adam Cooper (Assassin’s Creed, Exodus: Gods and Kings) who wrote the script with his regular writing partner Bill Collage.
The dead man is philosophy professor Joseph Wieder (an impressive Marton Csokas). He was beaten to death in his home. The murder weapon was not found.
That was a decade ago. A young black man, Isaac Samuel (Pacharo Mzembe), confessed to the crime and was sentenced to death. His execution is a month away.
One of the homicide detectives who interrogated him, Roy Freeman (Crowe), is retired in disgrace after a drink driving incident. A civil rights group encourages him to reinvestigate the case.
His problem – and the hook for this movie – is he has Alzheimer’s. In the opening scene he’s in his apartment and there are stickers identifying everything, including his own name. When he opens the microwave to cook a frozen dinner, he finds the melted TV remote. Crowe does all of this very well.
He is undergoing an experimental treatment that may bring back the memories he has lost. He contacts his former partner, Jimmy Remis (Scottish actor Tommy Flanagan), who was also in the interrogation room. He has a shifty look about him.
In the flashbacks, which are the main part of the film, Dr Wieder and his beautiful young research fellow Laura Baines (Scottish actor Karen Gillan) are working on a radical neuroscience project. They believe it is possible to make traumatic memories disappear.
Laura meets a fellow student, Richard Finn (Harry Greenwod, son of Hugo Weaving, who continues to make his own mark) and they hit it off. He wants to be a novelist. He thinks the professor is too touchy-feely with Laura.
There’s also, in the best Agatha Christie sense, a caretaker, Wayne Devereaux (Thomas M. Wright), an Iraq War veteran who, one, has traumatic memories and, two, knows how to kill a man.
The director says his inspiration was loss-of-memory movies such as Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000).
He pulls the strands of this thriller tightly together with satisfying twists along the way. Everyone is a suspect. And each one of them remembers more about the lead-up to Dr Wieder’s murder than Freeman does.
“It’s like everyone from Wieder’s life at that time is now a f..king ghost,’’ Freeman says. When he starts to see the ghosts for who they are and moves closer to the truth of what happened, it is Russell Crowe at his best.
Sleeping Dogs (MA15+)
110 minutes
In cinemas
★★★½
