Alfred Hitchcock long had a fascination with the fine line between wishing someone dead and doing the deed (“Rope,” “Strangers On A Train“) and that vibe gets a workout in the ’50s-set “A Kind Of Murder.”
Directed by Andy Goddard, starring Patrick Wilson, Jessica Biel, Haley Bennett, Vincent Kartheiser, and Eddie Marsan, and based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith (no slouch when it comes to moral complexity), the story follows a man stuck in an unhappy marriage, who embarks on an affair, and wishes his wife were gone. But fate soon comes knocking when she winds up dead, and he must face his own guilty conscience. Here’s the synopsis from the Tribeca Film Festival, where the movie debuted this spring:
Architect Walter Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson), crime novelist by night, is quite unhappily married to Clara (Jessica Biel), a successful real estate saleswoman. As Walter becomes fascinated by the case of Melchior Kimmel, a bookstore owner in New Jersey suspected of murdering his wife Helen, he begins to imagine what it might be like to murder his own wife. In this faithful adaptation of the 1960s suburban thriller, The Blunderer, written by Carol author Patricia Highsmith, the question of how we judge a person’s guilty conscience in the death of another plays a central theme. When Clara turns up dead, Walter starts to seem increasingly guilty as he finds himself at the unfortunate intersection of a conniving murderer and a resolute cop. A Kind of Murder seamlessly combines philosophical musings on culpability with edge-of-your-seat Hitchcockian noir.
There’s no U.S. distributor for this one yet, but check out the international trailer to see what this one delivers. [Live For Film]
