‘The Lesson’: Review

Dir. Alice Troughton. UK/Germany, 2023. 103mins

A thriller-ish drama about two writers – master and servant, literally – with a troubled teenage son thrown into the mix views like airport fiction come to life. With Richard E. Grant as the best-selling author and Daryl McCormack as his biggest fan, this is a slickly-packaged and appealing primetime TV-friendly drama which bows at Tribeca before a release in the US through Bleecker Street on July 7, undoubtedly as a prelude to landing on a prestige TV or streamer service.

A watchable, polished, undemanding and vaguely familiar package

Episodic director Alice Troughton (Baghdad Central) makes her feature debut with this lower-budgeted twisty drama, and producers were lucky to land McCormack in the lead as his star is in the ascendant. Initially coming across as an update of Ordinary People –  with Julie Delpy in the Mary Tyler Moore role – this has pulpier aspirations, as the doomed lake at the front of the central mansion turns into a swamp. Rounding out the quartet is talented young Scottish actor Stephen McMillan (Boiling Point), whose character is left to fend for himself as the adults become increasingly entangled in the weeds.

Eminently watchable Irish actor McCormack plays aspiring writer and Oxford literature graduate Liam, who has a photographic memory and a sideline in tutoring. The film is framed in flashback, meaning his fate is never in jeopardy. Early shots of him disrobing for a swim seem rather gratuitous, although they do establish a watery theme before he decamps to a grand house in the British countryside to tutor his literary hero J.M. Sinclair’s (Grant) troubled son Bertie (McMillan), who also aspires to a degree in literature at Oxford. There has been a tragedy in the family – the suicide of an older, adored sibling – and Sinclair’s frosty French art collector wife Helene (Delpy) is trying to help her son in the face of this trauma and his father’s domineering disapproval.

There are attempts to bring class differences to the mix – Liam’s unfamiliarity with classical music, for example – but it’s hard to pitch this correctly in such a multi-national household, unless you deliberately read Liam being Black and Irish as a visual/aural code which hopefully isn’t the case. It’s almost a relief to read in the credits that the house itself is located in Germany because the film just doesn’t seem rooted in any culture, whether that be academia, literary, or Oxford/UK. It works better as the same sort of nowhere-land in which last year’s Amazon hit All The Old Knives  was set.

Whatever the case, this family are crashing, unlikable snobs, and that’s the message which Troughton is keen to emphasise as she edges Alex MacKeith’s screenplay out of dark comedy into thriller terrain. Liam, himself a naked opportunist, is desperate to ingratiate himself with his idol, but soon discovers Sinclair a deeply unpleasant domestic tyrant (a character trait which Grant tackles with suitable relish). So now, how far will Liam go? Why does Sinclair keep a server running in his dead son’s locked bedroom? Will Liam’s photographic memory come in handy apart from being able to quote chunks of Sinclair’s text back at its author? And why does the film keep repeating Sinclair’s mantra about how every writer needs to steal?

A score by Isobel Waller-Bridge can occasionally be a little too emphatic in its quirkiness, but is mostly used as a cheeky motif to enliven proceedings. The cast approaches the task with enthusiasm, particularly Grant. The actor works better with repressed fury than abandon and is excellent at slyly comic turns, but having to follow the script into increasingly lurid terrain is a shame for the controlling character he has created. A watchable, polished, undemanding and vaguely familiar package, the main surprise in The Lesson is that that this is the debut screenplay from MacKeith and not a literary adaptation itself.