Blockhead review – struggling novelist embraces his inner monster in comic thriller of literary machismo

Writer-director Matt Harlock looks into ego and insecurity in a smart film about a BritLit bad boy who goes down a grisly road

This has nothing to do with Ian Dury; rather, it is a brisk, effective British indie thriller informed by the legend of Robert Louis Stevenson wrestling his shadow self while writing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The present-day equivalent proposed by writer and director Matt Harlock is BritLit posterboy Will Mercer (Danny Horn), much admired for his debut novel A Random Act yet presently mired in indecision over a follow-up that seems likely to cost him relationships, representation and reputation alike. Retreating to a friend’s garret, he is woken by a builder: bullet-headed, charismatic hulk Mikey (Joe Sims), who merits and invites closer literary study. Mikey is unarguably an arresting character – a very handy golem in overalls – even if we worry about the path he’s leading our man down.

No prizes, then, for guessing which David Fincher film provides the template here. Typing to a soundtrack of his own best reviews (“The world needs to hear your story”), an emboldened Will is soon exploring grislier avenues, including home invasion and murder, while his increasingly unhinged rants to creative-writing students attract a rapt protege. Evoking a world where publishers push books with unequivocally positive pull quotes like “confrontational” and “dangerous”, Harlock is taking a red pencil to hackneyed notions of bad-boy writers. There is, he posits, only so much muscle one can wield while hunched over a laptop.

Crucially, Harlock matches literary smarts with cinematic elan: suggestive use of masks and screens; a stark contrast between the blank-page sparseness of Will’s lodgings and the night he strays into; a symmetrical mise en abyme tying everything together. (One nicely Hitchcockian touch: the string of fairylights following one victim over a balcony.) Horn nails the writer’s tempestuous mix of bravado and insecurity, while Sims’ Mikey revels in skewering Will’s loftier pretensions. A few first-feature wobbles aside – a mid-film drug trip is only partly justified by a Coleridge namedrop – we’re walking similar streets to Christopher Nolan’s microbudget breakthrough Following, but this time with wittier, satirically minded company.