Images by Dean Kavanagh
Composure is a neo-absurdist mystery noir, a psychological twilight thriller, set in a fictional world somewhere between Classical Hollywood and European art-house. Webster is an urbane villain in catastrophe, a criminal mastermind who’s lost the plot. The film charts his melancholy decline into sadness, delusion and alcoholic psychedelics.
James Devereaux as Webster
John Giles as Maurice.
Alfie Black as Martin A’Peasant.
When the man who’s blackmailing him mysteriously vanishes, Webster sets out to discover what happened. His journey takes him back through the cheap, underworld culture of which he’d been a part, but he discovers that too is vanishing, as those he knows flee their crimes. Webster is left holed-up in his isolated beach-house, bewildered and vulnerable, with only his fears and a bottle of Scotch for company. Can he piece together the fate of his blackmailer from the fragments of evidence around him and so save his sanity?
Composure uses the crime genre to examine the fragility of the carefully composed personalities people present to the world, how they fray and crack and fragment under pressure, revealing the paradoxes that rest at their heart.
Gently tragi-comic, Composure will be given it’s expression through the use of the history and art of cinema, and through careful, patient rhythms, rather than the smug, shock tactics of contemporary movies. It will strive to obtain some of the elegance of classical-era Hollywood, and will owe something to Pietro Germi’s comic-noir aesthetics of Divorce Italian Style. The acting and dialogue will be snappy and precise, and will be forever indebted to Ray Milland, who’s work influenced the direction of the central character. Composure will be in elegant black and white, and concludes the triptych that began with Noir-ish Project and continued with Distracted.
James Devereaux
April, 2020
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