Kevin Spacey’s redemptive journey of uncancelling steps another millimetre forwards, or sideways, with his somewhat bizarre new role in this low-budget British indie in which, as a disembodied voice, he plays the implacable punisher of other people’s sexual misdemeanours.
It’s actually a decent idea for a single location cat-and-mouse thriller set in a car – similar to, actually maybe better than the idea behind the recent Liam Neeson thriller Retribution. And it was a smart entrepreneurial idea to create a role which Spacey could conveniently record in a studio anywhere in the world. Spacey’s silky, sulky voice saves the film from disaster, just slightly, although there’s nothing he can do about the terribly clunky direction and torpid line-readings from other people.
We are apparently in a future world where tech and AI have made great strides. A besuited man described by other characters as the “British Prime Minister David Addams” gives a speech in a weirdly inexpensive looking function room to a group of people who look as if they have just appeared in The Office Christmas Special. His theme is the overwhelming importance of privacy and afterwards with some bafflingly indiscreet and explicit dialogue makes it very clear to anyone within earshot that he is having a passionate affair with someone described as “the home secretary” – whose name is Stella Simmons.
David has to stay late at this oddly low-rent-looking function and Stella agrees to drive his very sleepy teen daughter home in her state-of-the-art driverless car. But part way into the journey the car starts going where the home secretary doesn’t want it to go. In a panic, she realises she can’t control it. She has lost control of her car - and her life. And then the unmistakable voice of her online tormentor, Kevin Spacey, is heard - jeering and taunting and sometimes going into a spoof cock-er-ney azz-yer-father accent. He sounds sarcastic and slightly despairing. And in this film he has a lot to be sarcastic and slightly despairing about. But who is he? And what does he want? Apart from to appear in films again?
Actually this isn’t the first time Spacey has played a creepy voice – he did it in Duncan Jones’s sci-fi Moon in 2010, playing the voice of the HAL-ish spaceship computer which has a sinister mind of its own. But in that film there turned out to be quite a bit more going on. Perhaps Control will gain cult status – or inspire a remake. But Spacey’s eerily detached, jaded presence does not do much for his putative comeback.
