The milieu is unusual, and the movie looks more lavish than you'd think its budget could allow. But the story doesn't exactly startle with surprises and has a tendency to hammer and rehammer its points. A few later scenes threaten to outstretch the Great Wall. We're ultimately told that by 1905, even the elderly Lord Tan was appearing before the camera. This was, of course, early enough for him to avoid seeing what the Marx Brothers would do to opera on screen 30 years later.
Women can be just as scummy and conniving as men.
We don't need any blackhearted noir thriller from Scotland to tell us that, especially one this hateful. But the filmmakers forgot to add sympathetic characters or employ flashy editing to relieve the cheap shocks and general ugliness onscreen. A couple of molls share dreadful taste in boyfriends. They meet when desperate Dorothy, escaping from her trashed apartment, happens upon Petula getting throttled by her boyfriend and rescues her by bashing him with a huge metal pipe. He dies and the women plot to pass his disappearance off as an abduction, then abscond with the ransom.