Film

In his radical overhaul of Anthony Shaffer’s play (and a 1972 film), Harold Pinter (the Nobel-laureate playwright famous for spare dialogue and long, meaningful pauses) turns Shaffer’s gaudy, meandering curiosity into a fascinating and tension-filled character study.

In Shaffer’s plot, a mystery writer convinces his wife’s young lover to fake a break-in of the writer’s house for an insurance scam; when the younger man accedes, the writer turns the tables on him. Pinter takes those bones and builds around them from the ground up. The result is a cat-and-mouse game ten times as menacing as the rather campy original. Caine, who played young Milo in ’72, graduates to the role of the author; unlike Laurence Olivier’s hammy take, his Andrew Wyke is authentically sadistic and pitiable. Law gets the ultimately showier role (we won’t spoil it by saying more) and displays surprising range.

Wyke’s creepy collection of antique automatons, which dominate the setting in Shaffer’s script, is replaced here by a maximally wired house. Everything in Wyke’s ultramodern abode, from sliding walls to an elaborate surveillance system, is controlled by a single remote. Branagh uses this to his advantage, framing action through security-camera screens or automated window blinds. When we do get an unobstructed shot of the men, it’s an extreme close-up of half a face, or repeated infinitely on a screen behind them. It’s a clever, if less-than-subtle visual metaphor for the pair’s mind games: Everything we see of these two is run through one filter or another.