A Prayer Before Dawn review – Thai jail drama packs a terrifying punch

Traditionally, boxing is the way out of the ghetto, or the way into a central core of toxic masculinity – and then redemptively out of it. In this movie, it is the route to a safer, fractionally more prestigious, marginally less violent part of a Thai jail: the Klong Prem central prison in Bangkok. This is the true story of Billy Moore, a guy from Liverpool who got involved in drugs and burglary, tried to restart his life in Thailand as a boxer and stuntman, but was arrested there in 2005 for gun offences and sentenced to three years in this authentically terrifying place. He earned respect for mastering Muay Thai boxing, and was finally released in a royal amnesty in 2010 to serve the rest of his term in the UK. He was convicted again this summer for burglary.

This film has been adapted by screenwriters Jonathan Hirschbein and Nick Saltrese from the memoir Moore published about his experiences, and directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, who made the comparably grisly child-soldier drama Johnny Mad Dog in 2008. Billy is played by Joe Cole from TV’s Peaky Blinders, and his weirdly cherubic face of almost choirboy innocence hardens into a mask of rage and fear. Vithaya Pansringarm (who was the cop in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives) plays the prison warden.

This is visceral, often unwatchably brutal stuff: a moment-by-moment depiction of an unspeakable ordeal. Watching it feels pretty much like having your intestines wrenched out of your eye sockets, especially in one unbearable scene: in a sweatily crowded cell, tattooed gangsters rape a prisoner for Billy’s benefit, as an evil demonstration of power.

For non-Thai-speaking audiences, it is also claustrophobic because the dialogue is unsubtitled, thus putting us right inside the prison house of Billy’s mind. As warders bark orders and fellow prisoners scream at him, or at each other around him, Billy is terrified, bewildered. He has only a basic knowledge of what is going on. But a basic knowledge is all he needs, because the power relations are themselves so basic. Tellingly, it is almost an hour and a half into the film before we hear a sentence in English, when a worried doctor tells Billy some very bad news.

At any one time, a sinister shuffling choreography is being acted out. Like figures in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, the sweating, half-naked prisoners will swarm up to Billy, or away from him; they will cuff him, slap him and jostle him, maybe to punish him, maybe to get his attention, maybe to mime what they want him to do. Sometimes they will yell and sometimes burst out into aggressive and unreadable laughter, mocking whatever baffled response Billy has tried to improvise to get them to go away. Finally, Billy persuades a trainer to let him box and his talent gets him a ticket out of the grim overcrowded area and into the cushier “boxing” cells. But the wiseguys will want a cut of whatever gambling winnings they assume Billy gets, and his addiction and health get steadily worse.

The spectacle being offered up in A Prayer Before Dawn is part of a well-established tradition, challenging or troubling according to viewpoint. You could find it in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, or even David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai – the spectacle of the white man in a foreign jail, his white body in fierce contrast to everything around him; his unclothed state, designed of course to subject and humiliate, is even more conspicuous. Perhaps he is innocent, or perhaps he is guilty, but that is not even the point. His foreignness or otherness is part of the ordeal, and the cruel-and-unusual quality of this foreignness is part of the dramatic impact: a doubling of imprisonment. Yet I never felt the Thai characters being patronised by the film; there is a tough respect in the training scenes.

It is perhaps foolish to compliment a film on being “real” if you have no independent knowledge of what that reality is, but A Prayer Before Dawn really did seem overwhelmingly real, and the fight sequences themselves are terrifically shot. In boxing movies, what happens in the ring is a metaphorical extension of what’s happening outside it. Here, there’s nothing metaphorical about it. Violence is all around. It’s a film of teeth-rattling ferocity.

Rebel Wilson ordered to repay $4.1m to Bauer Media after appeal

Actor Rebel Wilson will be left with less than 12% of the record $4.7m defamation payout she was originally awarded, after being ordered to hand back the majority of funds.

And the Hollywood star still needs to deduct some legal fees from what’s left.

Wilson was awarded a landmark payout in September 2017 after a defamation trial over a series of articles that made her out to be a liar.

But an appeal in early June found she was not entitled to $3.9m in economic damages relating to a loss of income, which made up a portion of the damages.

The Court of Appeal on Wednesday ordered Wilson repay Bauer Media $4,183,071.45 – including $60,316.45 in interest – after the original judgment was set aside.

Bauer had been quick to handover the original $4,749,920.60 payout, making a transfer to Wilson within three weeks of the 13 September judgment.

The star said she planned to distribute the money to charity and the Australian film industry.

But on appeal Wilson did not dispute that the $4.1m should be repaid.

She argued, however, the interest should be charged at the prevailing Reserve Bank cash rate of 1.5%, rather than the 2% sought by Bauer.

The appeal court disagreed and ordered interest be paid at the higher rate.

Wilson was also ordered to pay 80% of Bauer’s appeal costs.

My Friend Dahmer: is it time to stop glamorising the serial killer?

My Friend Dahmer is about as unglamorous a serial-killer movie as you could hope for: it doesn’t even feature any murders (not of humans, at least). Instead, it lays out the warning signs that all was not right with the teenage Jeffrey Dahmer: his unstable parents, his repressed sexuality, his high-school victimisation, his unwholesome interest in anatomy.

And yet, by its very existence, the movie can’t help but glamorise its subject, who went on to variously rape, murder, dismember, violate and cannibalise his 17 male victims. It doesn’t matter if you portray them as damaged souls or psychopaths; you’re still adding to the legend. Faced with this realisation, much of our current serial-killer fare has cast realism aside to embrace the glamour. That was certainly true of Ryan Murphy’s miniseries The Assassination of Gianni Versace, whose glitzy Miami settings, A-list cast and 90s couture made for a more appealing watch than such grubby classics as, say, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Meanwhile, Zac Efron is set to play Ted Bundy in a big-screen thriller that suggests that, with the right breaks, Bundy could have had a fruitful career as a lifeguard. And who knows what Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming Manson flick has in store? He’s described it as “probably the closest to Pulp Fiction that I have done”.

Post-Hannibal Lecter, we prefer our killers cultured, intelligent and presentable, like Dexter, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman or Kevin Spacey in Seven. That dangerous glamour also rubs off on the actors. It never looks bad to have a serial-killer role on your CV, especially if all that’s on it so far are wholesome teen roles. That was the case with Ross Lynch, AKA Young Jeffrey Dahmer, who’s been largely a Disney kid up to now. Versace’s murderer Andrew Cunanan was played by Darren Criss, previously best known for Glee, just as Efron was once indelibly associated with High School Musical.
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Which brings us to the best current take on serial killers: David Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter, detailing the early history of FBI psychological profiling. Our wide-eyed fed hero, Holden (Jonathan Groff, another Glee graduate), is almost starstruck by the killers he interviews, including Ed Kemper and Richard Speck. He considers Manson the ultimate challenge. But unlike previous serial-killer thrillers, including Fincher’s own Seven and Zodiac, Mindhunter examines the troubling mix of awe and disgust with which we regard these murderers. In the final episode, Holden visits Kemper in hospital. “Why are you here, Holden?” Kemper asks. “I don’t know,” Holden replies. Kemper then hugs him, as he finally realises how totally messed up things have become. We’re right there with him.

Custody review – the screw turns in understated separation drama

There’s a unidirectional agony to this psychological drama from actor turned director Xavier Legrand – this is the much-talked-about festival prizewinner which Legrand developed from his 2013 short Avant Que De Tout Perdre, or Just Before Losing Everything. Legrand could have kept that title for his full-length feature version. It’s almost a story without a story, in that there is hardly any narrative progression as such, no phased revelation of character, no twist and counter-twist, and no point-of-view switches designed to raise queries about the truth. No: the focus is on one single horrible situation, getting steadily and unwatchably worse: a simmering pot of rage and toxic masculinity under which the gas-ring gets turned up and up. It concerns a divorce, and a legal hearing about custody.

Denis Ménochet plays Antoine, a glowering, heavy-set guy who is in dispute with his ex-wife Miriam (Léa Drucker) about custody of their 11-year-old son Julien (Thomas Gioria). The couple have an elder daughter Joséphine (Mathilde Auneveux) who, being about to turn 18 and enter adulthood, does not form part of the case. The drama begins with a hearing in front of the judge (Saadia Bentaïeb) who must hear Miriam’s fears about Antoine’s violence and threats, although there is no clear legal evidence.

The case is settled by the judge in a way that surprises both parties. Now Antoine is allowed access to Julien, but not allowed to know Miriam’s address, to interfere with their household arrangements – and he certainly has no say in the matter of Julien acquiring a new stepfather. With icy rage, Antoine decides he has a right to know everything that’s going on and begins to turn the screw on his innocent, terrified son. The performances are frighteningly good – and without these performances, in fact, the film would have been merely blank or histrionic. This especially applies to Gioria as the young son, and more than any actor in a film I can remember, he conveys what emotional and physical abuse is like. Julien’s scenes with Antoine have to be watched between your fingers. Legrand shows how simply getting into his dad’s car and being driven by him is an unspeakable ordeal; there is a clever moment when the seatbelt alarm keeps pinging because Julien has failed, to his dad’s irritation, to buckle up. Later, Antoine will be too enraged to do it himself and the pinging becomes an ominous alarm system for his state of mind. Meanwhile, other family tensions are orbiting.

The film shows that a lot of Antoine’s macho rage and bullying derives from anger at his own father, Joël (Jean-Marie Winling). Miriam is also concerned that Joséphine’s education is about to be derailed by her possessive boyfriend, Samuel (Mathieu Saikaly), who seems charming enough – but Miriam knows how these things can turn out. And where are we going with all this? The temptation is to compare Custody with Asghar Farhadi’s modern classic A Separation. But they are quite different. Custody doesn’t have the subtlety or nuance of Farhadi’s film, nor is it quite like Joachim Lafosse’s divorce drama from 2016, L’Économie Du Couple, or After Love.

There are moments in the original custody hearing here which hint that blame may not be straightforward. But actually, blame is pretty straightforward, and it is incidentally a flaw of this film that it sticks very predictably to Chekhov’s rule about what happens to a firearm which is produced in act one. The film it resembles much more is something like Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer, or Hell, from 1994, about a married man who simply descends into the horror of fanatical jealousy and paranoia. There is not much storytelling light and shade in Custody, but it has the shock and swipe of real life.

Robin Williams groped and flashed me on set, says Mork & Mindy co-star

Robin Williams’s Mork & Mindy co-star has said he repeatedly grabbed her breasts and bottom and exposed himself to her on the set, a new book reveals, but she excused it as part of Williams’s playful personality.

“I had the grossest things done to me by him,” said Pam Dawber, who played Mindy. “And I never took offence. I mean I was flashed, humped, bumped, grabbed. I think he probably did it to a lot of people … but it was so much fun.”

Williams would also wrestle her, break wind on her and come on to the set totally naked. He also once “goosed” an elderly woman playing Mindy’s grandmother by poking her between the buttocks with a cane.

The revelations are contained in a new biography of Williams by New York Times journalist Dave Itzkoff, to be published in May, and were reproduced in the Daily Mail.

“If you put it on paper you would be appalled,” said Dawber, 66. “But somehow he had this guileless little thing that he would do – those sparkly eyes. He’d look at you, really playful, like a puppy, all of a sudden. And then he’d grab your tits and then run away. And somehow he could get away with it. It was the 70s, after all.”

“It was just Robin being Robin,” said Howard Storm, who directed Mork & Mindy. Often Williams groped Dawber because he was “bored”, he said: “He’d be doing a paragraph and in the middle of it he would just turn and grab her ass. Or grab a breast. And we’d start again. I’d say, ‘Robin, there’s nothing in the script that says you grab Pam’s ass.’ And he’d say: ‘Oh, OK.’’’

The show’s producer, Garry Marshall, also recalled: “He would take all his clothes off, he would be standing there totally naked and she was trying to act. His aim in life was to make Pam Dawber blush.”

Mork & Mindy ran from 1978 to 1982, and starred Williams as a curious alien who lodged with Dawber’s Mindy in Boulder, Colorado. The show was Williams’s springboard to a successful movie career. He went on to star in Hollywood hits including Good Morning Vietnam, Dead Poets’ Society, Mrs Doubtfire and Good Will Hunting – for the last of which he won the best supporting actor Oscar in 1997.

Williams killed himself in 2014, following a history of depression, drug addiction and mental health issues. He was misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s and found after his death to have had Lewy body dementia.

Despite his on-set behaviour, Dawber characterised her relationship with Williams as sisterly and spoke of his “gigantic heart”. “I really loved Robin and Robin really loved me,” she said. “We just clicked.”