'I Came By' Review: High Bonneville & George Mackay Star In Babak Anvar's Bloated Thriller

It’s well-known by now that Netflix has a pretty lenient approach to storytelling when they support exciting filmmakers. You can sense that mentality in their massive productions, like Martin Scorsese finally getting to make “The Irishman,” with a three-hour running time. Or there are the countless smaller projects that run amok and usually aren’t entirely focused in their own right (see: many mid-budget Netflix Original Films, you know which ones). 

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Babak Anvari’sI Came By” is another one for that list of rickety, veritable unofficial director’s cuts, a bloated thriller that makes clearer what it is saying more often than what it is doing. The sometimes caustic, sometimes nasty Anvari (“Under the Shadow,” “Wounds”) isn’t playing by usual rules here, especially when it comes to main characters and the way they (usually) can’t just be wiped off the chessboard. But that ideology makes for so many bits of bleak excitement when the core “I Came By” starts to drag because it has so much else it wants to touch on. 

At least the movie can advertise itself as having Hugh Bonneville (“Downton Abbey”) as The Terminator, which he is more or less in this production. He’s a former judge who used to be praised for his progressive ways, using all of his money and nepotism for good. But we see that he’s stored away a much darker side, which comes with an ability to overpower and destroy many people in his path. If Bonneville’s sinister performance wasn’t so sound as someone whose status is itself overpowering, his physical power wouldn’t be believable enough. And yet there is a menace to seeing him in blue surgery gloves, holding a cricket bat, aware that he can get the London police off his back because he plays weekly squash with the captain. Anvari builds the movie around this monster to tease us about whether he can be stopped.

Bonneville’s Sir Hector Blake is the abyss that traps more than a couple of people in this home-invasion thriller that starts with a couple of infamous graffiti artists, Toby (George MacKay of “1917,” intense in his own ways here) and his buddy Jay (Percelle Ascott). The two have created a legacy for themselves by breaking into the homes of wealthy and tagging the words “I CAME BY” in big, bold red letters on their walls. Toby picks the wrong house early into the movie, that of Hector Blake, and he does this middle finger to the upper class without his buddy Jay. This isn’t Toby’s best idea, and let’s just say that what Toby finds in the basement creates a string of other people wanting to find out. That includes his therapist mother, Lizzie (Kelly Macdonald), Jay, a police detective named DS Ella Lloyd (Franc Ashman), who learns how powerful Hector is, etc. 

Anvari is working from an original screenplay he co-wrote with Namsi Khan, and there’s just too much going on for the plot to have its massive, creepy impact. Parallel to Hector’s sinister business is a thread about the horrors that immigrant children can face—by bureaucracy, their family’s expectations, or monstrous white figures like Sir Hector, who loves to terrorize Middle Eastern men—which then gets tangled with another thread about what parents like Lizzie really know about their child. Then there’s the focus on Jay becoming a new parent with his girlfriend Naz (Varada Sethu) and the tension that arises when Jay’s old ways threaten the relationship and their baby’s upbringing. These are all handled sensitively, and they do create some world-building, but it also becomes apparent when they’re taking away the focus from its sneaky mystery. 

“I Came By” shares some ideological similarities with Jordan Peele’sNope” in that both stories have horror filmmakers riffing on the many ideas that tug at their heartstrings while constantly trying to evolve their core story. Anvari displays a good penchant for a surprising development, even when the pieces on his chessboard can sometimes be moved with too forceful a hand (and certain clues in this mystery just seem too convenient to keep the story moving along). The best passages of Anvari and Khan’s script exemplify the rush of when a movie doesn’t feel like the same one it did five minutes ago. But “I Came By” isn’t clever and tactful enough as a whole, even for how it conjures a parable about resisting slimy figureheads—the act of breaking into Sir Hector’s home, one of many rhyming elements here, becomes an act of protest without Anvari having to make it so obvious. But the anger within this movie becomes muted along with its thrills. Anvari has proven to be a roller coaster horror filmmaker who should flourish with such freedom, but he loses the momentum here by his own design. [C]