Film review: The Legend Of Barney Thomson

A still from The Legend of Barney Thomson. Picture: Graeme Hunter/EIFF

BLACK comedies are tricky things to pull off as Robert Carlyle proves with The Legend of Barney Thomson, his tonally and stylistically scattershot directorial debut about a Glaswegian barber (Carlyle) who becomes the prime suspect in the hunt for a local serial killer.

Rating: **

It will perhaps impress indulgent festival audiences easily pleased by groaning Glaswegian banter, faux outrageousness and the sight of Emma Thompson subsumed by crone make-up and fag smoke, but whatever Carlyle is going for doesn’t translate into the macabre laughs its jokily violent premise demands.

Reminiscent of Filth in its try-hard shock-Jock humour, but lacking the emotional complexity that helped that film transcend some of its myriad flaws, The Legend of Barney Thomson homes in on its titular protagonist as he’s forced to confront his own obsolescence as a middle-aged, charisma-free “big streak of piss”. Newly demoted to working at the back of the shop, and then let go altogether, Barney’s insignificance in the world is reinforced by his domineering mother, Cemolina (Thompson), who doesn’t see the point of her son beyond giving her lifts to bingo at the Barrowlands.