IslandGuru Who payed the critics

Flyerplesys Perfectly adorable

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Bertie Wooster Yes, "Mystery" does vary in tone from other works by Dickens but not nearly to this extent. The whole movie plays like a sweaty dream induced by a night of heavy eating and drinking. It utterly lacks the feeling of concrete reality that Dickens somehow evokes even as he spins ludicrous tales.Not a single character feels like a real person with a real life beyond what appears on screen and a full range of emotions. There's never a hint that the choirmaster runs a choir, or that the lawyer has ever handled a case or that the schoolgirl has any studies.The very talented Matthew Rhys is wasted on a role with only two notes, hatred and self pity. But it's still the deepest role in the show. None of the other characters has more than one characteristic and many of them have none at all. Oddly, despite this lack of personality (or perhaps because of it) all of the characters are unlikable. There's no one to root for in the story.To make up for the lack of character, there is mood, lots of mood, hitting you in the face again and again with dream sequences and funny camera angles and music that is supposed to make us fearful in moments that are not scary to anyone older than 5.The production isn't even technically competent in a way you'd expect of the BBC. Rhys, who is great with accents and can surely do an English one, frequently reverts to his native Welsh. In one scene, they say the Lord's prayer as "Our Father, Who art..." rather than "Which art," which would have been used in Victorian England. It's a miracle a car did not drive through the background in one of the scenes.The worst adaptation of Dickens I have ever seen.

TheLittleSongbird The Mystery of Edwin Drood is both captivating and frustrating, captivating in its tension and suspense as well as the titular character and frustrating in its incompleteness. This adaptation is not perfect but does nobly with its source material. It does suffer from incompleteness(the book doesn't help) and its contrived and abrupt ending. But it is very handsomely filmed and remarkably authentic to the period it's set in, while the score is unobtrusive and hauntingly beautiful. The dialogue is carefully and intelligently adapted, making an effort to sound Dickenesian and not too contemporary, also nobly developing the characters in rich detail. The story is tense and suspenseful, with some good twists and turns and very compelling storytelling, more so in the first half admittedly. It is a very well-performed adaptation too, Matthew Rhys steals the show, intense and heartfelt it is a brilliant performance. Freddie Fox shows command of the Dickenesian language, Tamzin Merchant is appealingly pert and Rory Kinnear, Ian McNeise, Julia MacKenzie and Alun Armstrong turn in strongly dependable performances too. In conclusion, solid and very well-done especially for the performances. 8/10 Bethany Cox

hilaryjrp I just finished watching this film for the second time--and it is a film with production values equal to anything you could pay to see in a theater. I'm a former Dickens buff who gradually turned my attentions to Wilkie Collins; and what many reviews fail to mention is the extreme likeness between this 2012 adaptation and The Moonstone, the "crossing-over" of Dickens from crowd-pleaser to a man who might just have written one final novel for his own pleasure (as his former friend Collins always seems to have done). There is no shame in the character of John Jasper, something Matthew Rhys reveals with restraint. Rhys is excellent in being his very own doppelganger, to the extent that the viewer wonders if opium actually prevents his Jasper from being even more malignant. He deserves attention at awards' time for his portrayal of the nauseating convergence of guilt and agony.Ms. Hughes' strength *is* Jasper, whom she knows is a descendant of the striving middle-class hypocrites that Dickens was so good at, beginning with Jonas Chuzzlewit, then (most famously) with Uriah Heep, and--right before The Mystery of Edwin Drood--most menacingly with Bradley Headstone. As another reviewer points out, Rhys' Jasper captures the sexual menace of Headstone in a creepy, truly frightening, way. Of course some of Ms. Hughes' twenty-first century sensibilities are evident in Jasper's open sexual aggression toward Rosa, but the viewer can't help but suspect that this honesty would have been EXACTLY what Dickens would have wanted, if he had lived to finish the work. Years ago, a critic said that the novel had a feel of being written from beyond the grave. It is a palpably autumnal work that can make a reader or viewer wonder if Dickens' death was caused by his inability be as frank about the sexual aggression of his anti-hero as Wilkie Collins never had any trouble being at all.Hughes has an unerring instinct for what is and isn't Dickensian, including the recurrent--and disturbing--older man/younger woman couple (Crisparkle and Helena), the village idiot politicians, and the cruelty of the class system. This novel is set in a Hardyan place, and so there are no Southwark Nancy's or abused Jo's. Hughes showed a sensitivity to the thematic Dickensian staple--London--by making the character Edwin Drood perhaps more racist and callous than Dickens would have made him, thereby bringing sordid London into the countryside. Freddie Fox' portrayal is a pretty raw portrait of the Dickens' "cad."Shame, that this movie has not received the media and academic attention it deserves, because this was clearly a labor of love. Bravo--a perfect 10.

Murray Morison Usually BBC adaptations are outstanding; this one lacked something. As it is Dickens unfinished work it is hard to know if it was a failure on his part in the overall conception or whether the writer and director of this version just was not able to intuit where Dickens was taking this story.The acting is good and Mathew Rhys (Brothers and Sisters) is suitably menacing as the opium raddled John Jasper. Freddie Fox is also good as the eponymous Drood, spoiled and totally self absorbed.The arrival of the Ceylonese brother and sister provides one of the more interesting plot possibilities, but somehow the anger of the brother is never that convincing.In the end, watching the final climax, it was possible to see exactly how it was going to end, and it ended as predicted. There was a feeling of, 'oh is that it?' A missed opportunity or maybe the book was never really worth finishing.