LEVIATHAN

Set against the fog-drenched cobblestones of 1888 Whitechapel, "Leviathan" dares to take yet another swipe at one of history’s most infamous unsolved cases. But rather than rehashing tired tropes, director James Mansell offers a textured, stylised reimagining that reunites historical figures for a fictional collaboration: Arthur Conan Doyle, Professor Joseph Bell, and Margaret Harkness, drawn together by the brutal murders plaguing London’s East End. The concept is irresistible. The execution, though often impressive, feels like the beginning of something rather than a story in its own right.

Based on A Knife in the Fog by Bradley Harper, the film is a taut, 18-minute period thriller that largely unfolds within a single room — a post-mortem chamber, dimly lit, thick with tension and intellectual friction. As the trio gathers over the body of a slain woman, the film delivers more talk than terror. The Ripper may loom large in the background, but here, the emphasis is on deduction, debate, and ideological clash.

Matthew Lloyd Davies brings gravitas to Joseph Bell, capturing the clinical detachment and brilliance that supposedly inspired Holmes. Rafe Bird’s Doyle is measured, observant, somewhat caught between admiration and exasperation.

But it’s Lauren Cornelius’s Margaret Harkness who dominates the dynamic, and therein lies the film’s most divisive element. She is fierce, unrelenting, and rightfully unwilling to be sidelined. Yet her dialogue often veers into overwrought polemic, and her combative tone flattens the nuance that such a fascinating figure could have offered. The film wants her to be a force of disruption — and she is — but in its brevity, it sacrifices emotional complexity for volume.

Where "Leviathan" soars is in mood and presentation. Mansell, whose lineage ties him directly to Professor Bell, directs with striking visual control. Candlelight dances over dusty volumes and surgical tools; shadows stretch long across wooden panels, conjuring a palpable sense of decay and dread. Mat Hamilton’s score does not overplay — instead, it drips through the scenes like condensation on cold brick, underscoring the sense of creeping menace. The period production design is exacting, and the cinematography lends the confined space a haunted elegance.

But for all its atmosphere, the narrative feels truncated. "Leviathan" has the structure of a prologue — a taste of a larger, perhaps episodic tale yet to come. It introduces key players, hints at their ideological differences, and lays the foundation for a pursuit that we never get to see. There’s no payoff, no reveal, not even a narrative arc in the traditional sense. It ends where most mysteries begin.

Still, there’s undeniable ambition in what Mansell and Harper have built here. The film has the production value and confidence of a much longer piece, and it tantalises with the prospect of a broader series that could properly explore the intersections between gender, logic, class, and justice in late-Victorian London. The trio at its centre may need refining, especially in how their interactions unfold, but the groundwork has been impressively laid.

In the end, "Leviathan" is neither a full meal nor merely an appetiser — it’s a proof of concept: dark, cerebral, visually elegant, and brimming with the potential to become something formidable. But as a standalone short, it feels incomplete — a stylish, ambitious opening chapter still searching for its story.