Cold Light of Day

Plot synopsis:
Will Shaw (Henry Cavill) owns a consultancy business in San Francisco. During the summer break, he reluctantly visits his family in Spain for a holiday. He is met there by his father, Martin Shaw (Bruce Willis), who is himself an advisor for the government. That evening, a phone call to Will concerning his company's insolvency puts him in a bad mood and he decides to go fishing the next day. His preoccupation with the phone results in a sailing accident; Will leaps to save his brother's (Rafi Gavron) girlfriend Dara (Emma Hamilton) from being hit by the yacht's boom but she hits her head on a winch. While everyone is fussing over Dara, Will's phone rings again. In frustration, Martin grabs it and throws it into the ocean. Will decides to swim to town to fetch medical supplies and take some time to cool down. When he comes back, he can no longer find his family in the yacht.
Will goes to the police and they lead him to Zahir (Roschdy Zem), who knows the whereabouts of Will's family, and invites him along to be shown the way. Will senses something is amiss, and attempts to escape with the police car. Martin appears, beats the officers, and helps Will escape.
Martin reveals he is a CIA agent, and explains that the people who kidnapped their family are after a briefcase he had taken while carrying out a CIA assignment. Martin calls his CIA team leader, Jean Carrack (Sigourney Weaver) who agrees to meet him in Madrid. At the meeting, Will stays in the car while Martin talks to Carrack, who says she no longer has the briefcase for she handed it over to their superiors. He doesn't believe her and senses something is wrong. As Martin returns to the car, he is shot and killed by a sniper (Joseph Mawle). Will is shocked but when he gets out to check him, Martin's phone starts ringing and the sniper, Gorman, starts shooting at him. Will grabs the phone, leaves the car, and is chased through Madrid by Gorman. Will escapes, leaving his father's gun in a trash bin. During his escape, Will takes a call from the kidnappers, who want to speak to "Tom" and demand the briefcase in exchange for his family. He is given a deadline of 21 hours and a meeting point.
Will arranges a meeting with his father's friend, Diego. He arrives at Diego's office and meets receptionist Lucia Caldera (Verónica Echegui), who was the girl he spoke to on the phone and it transpires that Diego is her uncle. But Diego was killed by Carrack and Gorman. Will and Lucia escape across the rooftops, but Will is shot. Instead of taking Will to a hospital, Lucia takes him to a nightclub, to a friend who has medical experience. Lucia also tells Will that "Tom" is Martin's alias in Spain, and that she is actually Will's half sister, being Martin's daughter by another woman.
Lucia comes up with a plan to lure Carrack out by starting a tab on her credit card. Gorman appears and is subdued by bouncers at the nightclub and tortured for information. He gives nothing away and Will decides to let him think he has escaped and to follow him. This works and they follow him to Carrack, who has the briefcase and in negotiation with someone in an underground car park. But Carrack senses that something's wrong and starts attacking the negotiators and Will. After an extensive car chase through Madrid, the roles are reversed and Carrack chases them, angry at their interference. The cars collide and Lucia is seriously injured. Just as Carrack is about to shoot Will, she is shot by a sniper, and Zahir retrieves the briefcase. It was revealed that Zahir and his team are CIA agents and Carrack, with Gorman, is a traitor. Zahir commends Will and tells him that his father would have been proud of him. Lucia recovers in hospital, surrounded by her half family. Will is offered a job in the CIA; whether he accepts is left unresolved.

Tags: violence, murder, flashback

Review:
Low budget serial killer.
One has to admire the balls it took to make this movie.
For a start, the atmosphere is cloying and intense, and if you've taken the time to track this movie down then chances are you probably know a little bit about it.
Based on the crimes of British serial Killer Dennis Nielson, cold light of day is a slice of docu-drama little like anything you've ever seen before.
i saw this on video in its 75 minute entirety, and it is a difficult movie to sit through.
It makes you feel so uncomfortable, and tries, in its own way to present its characters with some compassion, but they are all so cold and pathetic that you squirm in your seat and wait for it to end.
It took me a long time to track this little gem down, and it has had a couple of releases in the UK throughout the 1990's, but its a hard film to watch.
Certainly a must for serial killer movie buffs or anyone interested in lensing their first movie, cold light of day is awkward and, in several places, downright unpleasant.
Henry Portrait of a serial killer was gruesome, Cold Light of Day is a shiver than runs down your spine in the dead of night..
A little-known but extremely disturbing chiller, based on a notorious true story.
Between 1978 and 1983, Dennis Nilsen - an outwardly unremarkable former soldier and police officer turned civil servant - killed at least fifteen men and boys (most of them students or homeless) in gruesome circumstances, allegedly retaining the corpses for sex acts before disposing of the butchered remains by hiding them in cupboards, under the floorboards, or simply by flushing them down the toilet.
This grimy, clammy, little-seen independent film is a lightly fictionalised account of Nilsen's hideous deeds, with a standout performance from Bob Flag as the milquetoast murderer, here renamed Jorden March.Fhiona Louise's film, clearly made on a shoestring budget, steers clear of exploitation tactics, choosing instead to cast its characters adrift in a singularly bleak, uncaring and desolate world of tatty pubs, squalid bed-sits, greasy cafés and grubby bathrooms.
The police interrogation of March is inter-cut with flashbacks that reveal not just his crimes (a living room disembowelment and the discovery of what's blocking the drains will send a shiver down the spines of even the hardiest souls) but also provide a window of understanding into what has tipped the apparently kindly loner over the edge.
Louise's direction is unobtrusive and detached, allowing the lengthy exchanges between the characters to play out in several lengthy takes, but it's this cold, flat, cinema-verité style that affords the proceedings much of their chilling power, conveying the sense that such horrors really could be unfolding in the street, or even the house, just around the corner.It's an easy film to admire - it won several awards - but it's not an easy film to watch, let alone enjoy.
As a fitting footnote, a caption card dedicates the preceding horrors to "those too sensitive for this world" - which, in his own perverse and twisted way, Nilsen surely was..
Turn down the sound, lipread the dialogue..
If you are reading this you will have come here with a purpose.
The sadistic trail of murderous narcissism left behind by Dennis Nilsen from 1978 until being caught in 1983 will be familiar.This low budget retelling, in the style of a reject Channel 4 documentary, disappoints on several levels.
The production could have been much more effective as a Film Noir.
Narrative should drive the action which takes place in the shadows.
Much more should have been made of conceptual imagery.
The long, wandering take of Nilsen's room that concludes the film hints at what is possible.One of the first ideas drummed into fledgling film editors is that sound is king.
People will forgive the occasional wobble or slip in focus, even a dreadful edit, but will only endure a few moments of poor sound.
From the opening whirl and deafening whoosh of whistling wind underpinned with rhythmic thumps, through the oh so too long tolling funeral bell complete with Darth Vader breathing, to the invasive wild-takes in street scenes, the soundtrack is jarring.The action of the film, concerning the enticement of the victims, their strangulation and drowning, followed by their dismemberment and disposal, is interspersed with sections of the police interview after arrest.
My reading of the notes taken at the time, this was before PACE and the routine tape recording of interviews, along with the subsequent evidence at trial, portrays a civil interrogation of a compliant, emotionless Nilsen, calmly admitting to his crimes.
In Fhiona Louise's version here we have the lead detective, Chief Inspector Simmons (Geoffrey Greenhill), in real life DCI Peter Jay, railing and shouting with his suspect, trying to obtain admissions of perversion and worse.The Nilsen character is played by Bob Flag, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the murderer.
For the film he is renamed Jorden March, possibly a nod to Whitemoor prison where, for a while, he was held.If you know nothing about this case then pass this one by.
If you are knowledgeable then you will find nothing new here except interpretation.
If you are looking for a low budget, amateurish, short to deconstruct then you have hit the jackpot..
An everyday story of a serial killer.
This is what they sometimes call a 'docu-drama,' which never really cuts it for me, it's either a documentary or a drama and never shall the twain meet.
It just doesn't work as either in the end.It tries for realism as a documentary with the everyday scenes meeting young rootless men in dingy cafés for the promise of a bed,food,drink and casual gay sex.
And tries for dramatic scenes with the murders and the ensuing aftermath.
But really works as neither as both parts come across as dull and boring.
Perhaps most killers are as uninteresting as this and maybe that is the point the film is trying to make.
Sadly it doesn't make it very entertainingThe pounding background music intended to heighten tension at crucial moments just grates and doesn't help at all.
I was going to say that some editing and cutting would have made the whole thing move faster and have increased the overall pace of the film.
But then I noticed on the general information about this film that a 32 minute version was released in the cinemas.
I've watched the much longer video version.As a film about killer, Dennis Nilsen, called Gordon Marsh in the film for what I assume was copyright reasons at the time of it's original release, it just doesn't engage the attention or make us understand anything about the character and his motives.Other documentaries have been made since about Nilsen that delved deeper and are more interesting and they would be better to search out and watch instead..
Cold Light Of Day.
"Cold Light Of Day" is more of a dramatisation than a film; fairly short, it explores the psychology of one of modern Britain's monsters.
Dennis Nilsen murdered twelve, possibly more, young men, purely for his own gratification.
A necrophiliac as well as a sexual sadist, his fascination with death is believed to have sprung from the death of his grandfather, that is if we can believe anything he said.We see flashbacks to his boyhood but the film concentrates on his picking up his victims and murdering them.
There is also an attempt to humanise him by showing his acts of kindness to an elderly neighbour.
To which the best reply is so what?
Ted Bundy actually worked on a suicide prevention helpline.
The names have been changed, which is understandable for victims and incidental characters, but was it necessary to change Nilsen's name to Jorden March?
Lead actor Bob Flag bears a striking resemblance to Nilsen - hopefully only a physical one!
- and it is easy to see why this ultra-low budget effort picked up a prize at the 1990 Venice Film Festival.