Pat Burton (Keith Eyles) is a British police officer who is a bit of a live wire. Recently his partner was killed and, when he tracked down the thugs who did it, he intentionally let them go from his custody. The next day, they were found dead. This has put him in a world of hot water with his superiors and he is staring at a full suspension, after he completes one last case.
A serial murderer has shown up in Folkeston, UK and is going around killing people with some sort of deadly paint ball gun. People who have encountered him, state that he claims to be God. His reign of murder seems to have no rhyme or reason, going from a minor pickpocket to an innocent priest.
For his final case, for the people of England to be able to sleep safely in bed, Pat must find the killer. However, as he tries to get to the bottom of the case, the British police make him take along a French detective named Victor (Antoine Douchet), who will be recording his every move for training French police academy recruits.
As they try to track down the mysterious killer, by following him via a nuclear disposal employee that he abducts from England to France, they begin to discover that “God” might be the most unusual killer either Pat or Victor have ever come across.
When killings start
occurring
in Folkeston...
...a mysterious killer that calls
himself "God" is at the middle of it.
Content
The “Chunnel” system enables much easier commerce and travel between Britain and France, and it is very cool to see how the two cultures are working together more often, in increasingly cool ways. This film is one such example, as Antoine Douchet is a French filmmaker who shot much of this film in England with a mix of French and English actors. The fact that this was worked into the story was a nice touch.
Probably the strangest element of the content of this film is actually a visual element tied directly to one character: Victor. Although Douchet’s “Victor” character is a main character in the film, we only actually see him “in frame” at the very end of the film. The rest of the film’s representation of Victor is from Victor’s camera perspective, with his voice coming from behind it. This is intercut with footage that the killer himself is recording and footage from security cameras. This footage has supposedly been cut together in a sort of Blair Witch-style documentary, after the events of the day in question by Victor. How successfully this works can be found in the Visual Look section. It is a very interesting way to tell a story and is rarely done.
The overall storyline had some times where it dragged a bit and some times that the creative twists needed to be explained a bit more. Overall, it kept your interest and made you curious to find out who “God” was. The acting worked fairly well, managing to be believable, in a pseudo-documentary style. Keith Eyles did an especially good job of making you buy into his character and his quest to hunt down the “God” killer. In addition to certain main actors being especially believable, some scenes were very amusing and somewhat clever. One example is the scene where the body of the man believed to be the “God” killer, is in the city morgue and two female coroners are preparing his nude body. One of the women bawdily encourages the other woman to squeeze and examine various parts of the corpse’s body, for her own amusement and so she can practice for future medical exams. This could seem extremely depraved, but it manages to show an element of the grim humor that can accompany the work of coroners. Due to its British randiness, you could not expect similar dialogue on American crime shows that have coroners as main characters, like NCIS or CSI.) Despite the fact that the writing and acting works in this current film, I would try to script future films a little more precisely, as the current dialogue did get a little rambling and unwieldy at times.
