Telegraph Review of Middletown (Mar 2007)

Middletown
(15 cert, 89 min)

Matthew Macfadyen is a prickly British star who is now faced with the Colin Firth Dilemma: how to shake Darcy off. The answer is not contained in this extraordinary religious psychothriller, in which he quivers with pasty outrage as a fundamentalist Northern Irish priest called Gabriel Hunter, coming home to cleanse his family's community of vice and fun.

He storms in to stop their cock fights, then goes home to lacerate himself with wire wool: each to his own. Pity his poor sister-in-law (Eva Birthistle), who's pregnant, wears short skirts, and runs the local pub, meaning she's right in the firing line as Satan's whore.

Brian Kirk's film doesn't even work as Gothic melodrama, because it's undone by loopy characterisation: one minute Gabriel's calling down fire and brimstone, the next he's begging to be put out of his misery. The whole thing's as mental as he is.