The Thousands

In the English beach resort of Brighton, a crime syndicate led by suave Mr Colleoni (Andy Serkis) is muscling in on a local standover gang. When ambitious 17-year-old spiv Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley) retaliates by killing rival gangster Fred Hale (Sean Harris), tea-room waitress Rose (Andrea Riseborough) becomes an inadvertent witness. To keep her quiet, Pinkie lures her into a fatally twisted romance. But Rose’s boss Ida (Helen Mirren) has figured everything out…

Graham Greene’s iconic 1938 novel was filmed in 1947, starring Richard Attenborough as Pinkie. Having come fresh to Rowan Joffe’s version, I enjoyed his update to 1964, the year of the seaside mods and rockers riots. Invoking the coming ‘youthquake’ cannily echoes the novel’s themes of Brighton’s evolving underworld, contextualises both Pinkie’s arrogance and Rose’s restlessness, and contrasts the subculturalists’ relative innocence with Pinkie’s jaundiced, vicious nature.

The tone is unsettling – mingling noir, moral fable and true-crime grit. It reminded me of another recent anatomy of psychopathy, The Killer Inside Me. While asserting that people’s character is fixed like the message embedded in a stick of rock, Joffe and Riley also ambivalently suggest Pinkie’s actions could equally spring from bewilderment or existential terror.