Who pulled the trigger on the return of the whodunit? The list of suspects is long and tantalising – as of course it should be. Could it have been Rian Johnson, the enigmatic writer and director of Knives Out and its forthcoming sequel? Was it the nefarious Quentin Tarantino, who passed off The Hateful Eight as a hard-bitten western, even though it was actually a classic drawing-room mystery, poisoned coffee pot and all? Or what about the dashing Kenneth Branagh, who started plotting his series of Agatha Christie adaptations in 2015?
Whoever the culprit may have been, what fun it is to see this long-defunct genre winkingly resurgent – and The Outfit, which premiered this evening at the Berlin Film Festival, is another fine addition to the canon. Co-written and directed by Graham Moore, whose script for the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game won an Oscar in 2015, it’s a thing of mousy, understated elegance – and as cunningly constructed as the suits sewn by Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance), a one-time Savile Row artisan now plying his trade in snow-blown Chicago of the 1950s.
Just don’t call him a tailor. Leonard’s pedigree makes him a cutter – and his flair with chalk, tape and shears is highly sought after by the city’s best-dressed crooks. So popular is he with the Boyle family in particular – a local Irish mob on the rise, led by Simon Russell Beale’s Roy Boyle – that his backroom is home to the gang’s dead letter box, from which payments and messages are regularly retrieved by Roy’s son Richie, played by Dylan O’Brien, and his right-hand man Francis, played by Johnny Flynn.
But there’s a problem: against this backdrop of stitching, a stitch-up. It’s believed that someone is passing information on the Boyle family to the FBI, and the film’s compact list of leads – Rylance, O’Brien and Flynn, plus Zoey Deutch as Leonard’s young assistant and semi-protégée, Mable – means the guilty party is right under their and our noses.
The Outfit takes place entirely over the course of a single eventful night within Leonard’s shop, ending with the mole’s identity coming to light – its title refers both to a local crime syndicate the Boyle family are trying to forge ties with and the suit Rylance’s character spends the film trying to finish off, even as all hell breaks loose. It’s testament to the artfulness of Moore and Johnathan McClain’s screenplay that your suspicions flit constantly between all four parties, and the denouement – which takes a surprising yet just about merited turn for the macabre – still manages to surprise.
