23 years have passed since Michael Palin’s last leading dramatic role – in Alan Bleasdale’s celebrated G.B.H. as harassed headmaster Jim Nelson – but it doesn’t show.
Two decades of travelogues, voiceovers and, most recently, the reunion of the Monty Python team has neither blunted the sensibilities required to carry off a convincing serious performance nor dampened his enthusiasm, at the age of 71, to take on a part that challenges him as an actor as much as it does the public perception of one of the nation’s best-loved public figures.
Perhaps that’s the point. There has always been an anarchic side to Palin and signing up for Remember Me may have been as much about shaking up his popular image as it was about returning to his Yorkshire roots.
Certainly, Tom Parfitt is light years away from the wry and unassuming globetrotter of Around the World in 80 Days and its many sequels, even if there is more than a hint of Python about the blustering, bedevilled pensioner (imagine a Black Mirror version of Palin’s character from the Four Yorkshiremen sketch).
However, the fleeting humour in Tom’s eccentricities is only one facet of a performance that is rich in variety: voluble and bluff one moment, pensive and haunted the next. Palin nails it every time.
The story is good, too: melancholy and genuinely eerie. Having deliberately engineered a move to a nursing home by faking a fall down the stairs, 81-year-old Tom is witness to a horrible tragedy. His social worker brings him a keepsake from his old house: a photograph of her elderly charge as a boy. Moments after taking it to his room, she’s spread-eagled on the pebbledash below his third floor window. When young care worker Hannah (Jodie Comer) arrives a few seconds later, Tom is cowering in the corner, clutching the photo.
‘I should have stopped her,’ he mumbles. ‘But I’ve never had the strength.’ Later, he asks Hannah to take the picture and his suitcase (which he brought to the home without packing anything) back to his house, warning her to throw them through the front door and not enter. Having established that the photo is actually only part of the original image, the other half having been torn off at some point in the past, Hannah heads to Tom’s former residence – but despite his warning she, goes in.
With taps dripping, floorboards creaking and notes being picked out on the parlour piano, the house ups the terror levels to ‘severe’ within minutes of her entering. By the time she finds numerous copies of the sheet music for ‘Scarborough Fair’ in the piano stool and the bathroom mirror clouds over, they rise to ‘critical’ and she hurries away, leaving the photo of young Tom behind.
Later, Zamir and Akil from next door break in, the two youngsters hoping to track down some antiques. What they find is an attic full of awfulness. At first, it’s just a candlelit toy room, with old dolls, a vaguely menacing teddy bear and the other half of the torn photo, which shows an Indian woman holding Tom’s hand; then it’s a horror show. The candles go out, the drawers on the toy chest slam (Mary Poppins this ain’t) and a foaming torrent of water gushes down the stairs after the fleeing boys.
‘She doesn’t want us here,’ Zamir gasps – but the problem isn’t only confined to Tom’s old house. In the morgue, a tear runs down the face of the dead social worker, while at Hannah’s place, she is dreaming of a desolate beach and a woman in traditional Indian dress at the shoreline, slowly rising to her feet. When Hannah awakes, the same insidious spectacle is unfolding at the bottom of her bed.
Is it a nightmare within a nightmare, or is she now being pursued by the thing from which Tom was trying to escape?
Director Ashley Pearce uses standard modern movie techniques to create a disorientating, dreamlike sense of fear – repeated images, quick camera jumps, very loud and protracted industrial noises – but familiarity with the process doesn’t make it any less effective.
Remember Me’s claustrophobic creepiness lingers in the memory long after the credits have rolled.
Aired at 9pm on Sunday 23 November 2014 on BBC One.
> Order Remember Me on DVD on Amazon.
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