Film review: Shadow Dancer

Films about terrorists have recently tended to focus on Middle Eastern conflicts, joining a genre that includes Syriana and United 93. But it is the Troubles (the bitter and long-running discord in Northern Ireland, which has become less bloody since the Good Friday Agreement of the 1990s) that form the backdrop to this taut thriller.

In 1973, Belfast 12-year-old Colette McVeigh (Andrea Riseborough) sees her younger brother killed in a gunfight between British troops and members of republican paramilitary group the IRA. Fast forward to 1993, and adult Colette is on a tube (metro) in London clutching a bag, which the director leaves the viewer to surmise contains a bomb. The attack is thwarted, and Colette is detained by compassionate MI5 officer Mac (Clive Owen), who offers her a choice: prison and her son taken into care, or become an IRA informant.

But keeping her family together also means betraying her family, as her surviving brothers – firebrand Gerry (Aidan Gillen) and thoughtful Connor (Aidan Gillen) – are fellow IRA operatives, and Colette must balance participating in their violent missions with her informing duties, all the while avoiding the death sentence of detection. Meanwhile, menacing IRA higher-up Kevin Mulville (David Wilmot) is trying to ferret out the rat – or tout in IRA parlance – he knows is in their midst. In one suspenseful scene a character leaves an apartment after a tense debrief with Kevin and sees a flunky rolling up a piece of tarpaulin that would have come into play had the interrogation gone the other way.

Films that follow a mole informing on a criminal group (The Departed, for instance) often plant us firmly on the side of the snitch so we more readily share their fear. Shadow Dancer takes a different approach. Though we sympathize with Colette and feel her predicament, she remains a mysterious and inscrutable protagonist, and aside from her protectiveness of her son, the film never gives us a handle on her motivation and innermost thoughts. Dedicated Mac, meanwhile, who is an open book, has his own struggles with higher-ups, as his department boss (Gillian Anderson) seems to have other plans for his informer.

From the early sequence on the London Underground, where the camera follows a wordless Colette for an extended period (reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which another mysterious woman is pursued) Shadow Dancer adopts a spare style of filmmaking – we learn more from what is left unsaid. At times it seems more suited to a TV slot than the big screen, favoring understated events thoughtfully presented over the big bangs a film about terrorism could indulge in. None of which means it is ever less than gripping – thrills and twists are delivered and the atmosphere and questions it poses will stay with you long after.

Much of this is owing to Riseborough’s enigmatic performance as the bomber-slash-single parent, though Clive Owen, as the moral heart of the film, also adds to its impact.