Film review: Revelations, double-crosses, and betrayals come thick and fast in The Outfit

The fact that the whole story takes place in two small, adjacent rooms adds considerably to the tension and claustrophobia

Zoey Deutch in The Outfit

★★★★☆

Opening in Chicago in 1956, The Outfit (15A) stars Mark Rylance as Leonard ‘English’ Burling, a bespoke tailor who has the dubious honour of being the personal tailor of Roy Boyle (Simon Russell Beale), the head of Chicago’s Irish mob.

When Roy’s son Richie (Dylan O’Brien) stumbles into his shop one night with a bullet in his gut, Leonard has no choice but to use his needle and thread to sew up Richie’s wound — it’s that or Richie’s buddy Francis (Johnny Flynn) will put a bullet in Leonard’s head. 

It’s a tense opening, and things quickly spiral into chaos: the script, by Jonathan McClain and Graham Moore (the latter directs), is a veritable corkscrew of a story, with revelations, double-crosses, and betrayals coming thick and fast

McClain and Moore have set themselves the challenge of telling their story according to Aristotelian unities — a single setting and a single driving action, all more or less taking place in real time — and while that might feel a little stage-bound for some viewers, the fact that whole story takes place in two small, adjacent rooms adds considerably to the tension and claustrophobia.

Mark Rylance is dependably superb as the soft-spoken, self-deprecating tailor (‘a dashing gentleman of a certain age’, as Leonard mockingly describes himself to his secretary Mable (Zoey Deutch)), and there’s excellent support from Dylan O’Brien as the wild-eyed, unreliable Richie and Johnny Flynn as the dead-eyed sociopath Francis, a role that could easily have been written for Richard Widmark or the young Robert Mitchum.

As those references suggest, this is classic neo-noir, albeit with a significant difference: the unarmed, polite Leonard must find a way to out-manoeuvre all the gun-toting hoodlums, even as the life-threatening situation keeps twisting out of his control.

An unnecessary coda rather spoils the beautifully wrought plot, but otherwise The Outfit is a quirky and very effective thriller.

(cinema release)