Here’s Why I Should Be Allowed to Make Another Sleuth Movie

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #183. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Interfacing in the millennium.

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On New Year’s Day last year, I watched two movies called Sleuth: one from 1972 with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, and one from 2007 with Michael Caine and Jude Law. Both based on the 1970 play by Anthony Shaffer, the earlier film is a fun, tight comedy directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a genuinely excellent movie, and the later one is a self-indulgent, self-important psychosexual shipwreck helmed by Kenneth Branagh, of all people, and crammed full of every conceivable corny early-aughts thriller trope. They’re both delightful and I recommend watching them one after the other like I did: it’s so fun to see what two directors do with essentially the same material, separated by time, sharing an actor, emphasizing different portions of the original text, approaching one story with different tones and interests. I have spent the entire year bringing up these movies through any conceivable justification, and now it’s your turn to suffer.

Basically, Sleuth is a play about two men fighting over a woman via a series of elaborate psychological games. The older man, Andrew Wyke, is a mystery author, and he invites his wife’s younger lover, hairdresser Milo Tindle, to his country estate to nominally formally gift his wife to him but really to elaborately torture him for the audacity of being young, hot and virile. There’s a part with an elaborate staged burglary and another part where Milo puts on a bunch of makeup and tricks Andrew into thinking he’s a cop and the whole thing becomes a convoluted layer cake of manipulation and deception and sexual antics and it’s a really ridiculous, enjoyable scheme both times. If you’re interested in watching them, please do so now, and return in four hours enlightened.

Mankiewicz’s 1972 film stays quite close to the original play, with the primary movement of the plot being a trading of games: Andrew, the flamboyant author, sets up a series of complicated and playful tricks to humiliate Milo that Milo ends up returning in kind. There’s a sense of Milo beating Andrew quite literally at his own game that emphasizes 1) Andrew’s underestimation of him, due to his youth and presumed lack of cleverness, and 2) Milo’s fair earning of the prize at the end, i.e. Andrew’s unseen wife. There’s levity to the situations they create for each other but also a level of intellectual complication, feeding into the heavy sense of genre awareness that the movie has so much fun with, where Andrew creates an elaborate game based on his novels and Milo then one-ups him within his own genre, with the tropes of police inspector and the long line of clues. It’s very cheeky and earnest, fairly light-hearted in the vein of the mysteries Andrew writes, and also incredibly intellectual: very much a game of wits.

In Branagh’s film in 2007, the game is far more about humiliation than cleverness. Instead of a cozy, eccentric country manor, Andrew lives in a high-tech modern house full of sharp corners and humming surveillance devices. His genre knowledge is de-emphasized, removed from the context of classic English mystery; one might imagine he’s more of a thriller writer. He shows far less playfulness and far more malice in the way he tortures Milo, and so when Milo shows up for the second round he’s not in the guise of an intelligent, genre-aware detective but a bully inspector, dirty and masculine, who unsettles and frightens Andrew by getting his grimy hands all over his controlled environment. There’s far more implied violence in this version than in the first, thought the amount of actual violence is the same: Milo is less restrained, and instead of it being a battle of equal wits it’s Milo responding to his humiliation with another game entirely, first manic violence and then youthful seduction, both intended to push Andrew out of his comfort zone. Andrew humiliated him with his temper, short-sightedness and naiveté, and so Milo humiliates Andrew with his age, arrogance and loneliness. Milo takes far less pleasure in outwitting his older opponent than Andrew did in the earlier film; instead, he pushes him to the emotional conclusion of their first game, the feeling of being “frightened to death,” losing that sense of absolute control that the Andrews in both versions value so much.

There’s a part in the play where Andrew, realizing that he’s been bested by Milo, asks him to stay with him and become a companion, a permanent game-player. He’s scared of Milo, and embarrassed of his own failure in their game, but he also wants the sense of partnership he felt when Milo met him, on his terms, in the dreamlike fantasy world in which he lives. Milo dismisses it immediately in the play – he’s young and confident in his sexuality, while Andrew, alone and wifeless, just wants a playmate – and it’s omitted entirely in the 1972 version, but in 2007 the de-emphasis of the offscreen female characters (Andrew’s wife and the younger woman he’s having an affair with) plus the portrayal of Milo as a seductive metrosexual means that Andrew’s feelings about the women in his life, impotence and love of youth, are transposed directly onto Milo. Milo, for his part, speaks cruelly and derogatorily about Andrew’s “games-playing sort of person,” which Andrew is using as intellectual shorthand but Milo clearly interprets sexually, even while exploiting his own role as the stand-in for Andrew’s absent wife. To destabilize Andrew, Milo then emphasizes not his intellectual aptitude as a potential games-player but his willingness to supplement the sexual outlet that they would both, in that context, be forgoing – with the wife forgotten, Milo can become the object of desire instead of the desirer. This is put into practice most obviously by Milo’s exit in the respective films: in 1972, he walks off carrying Andrew’s wife’s coat, but in 2007, he walks off wearing it.

There’s a lot of other fun shit going on in these movies! I think I could write just as much about the manor house itself as I just did about Andrew and Milo’s games: Branagh’s millennium-core, cool-walled camera mansion says so much about his version of Andrew without changing a word of the script. The second movie is less interested in genre, and in Andrew as author, which makes sense because of its de-emphasizing of Milo as an intellectual opponent. The first movie includes the truly ridiculous plot element of Andrew making Milo stage the burglary while wearing a clown costume, which follows the theme of both physical and psychological undressing, having to peel away the layers of something to get at the truth of it. Also, it’s so fun that they both star Michael Caine! I think that’s a delightful choice. I think we should keep doing that. Here’s my pitch for Maddi Chilton’s Sleuth starring Jude Law as Andrew Wyke:

• Andrew is James Patterson. He doesn’t write his own books; he did once, but not anymore. This comes up in the second half when Milo starts batting his own plot points at him that he’s not familiar with because he’s a faded wisp of an author resting on his own laurels.
• Go back to the manor house, the extensive and genre-aware emphasis on games, but keep Milo as a fundamentally different kind of animal than Andrew. Lay hard on the contrast: old vs. young, conservative vs. liberal, English vs. foreign, rural vs. urban. Get someone hotter than Jude Law to one-up Jude Law, though I don’t know how that’s possible.
• No idea how you could pull off the police inspector plot point now but also it’s far too good not to use. Maybe they’re out in the dark and Andrew can’t see him very well? I don’t know, we’ll workshop it. In general, the idea of Milo pulling Andrew out of his castle into the woods is fun and loaded with symbolism.
• In the digital era you’ve got to make the women more of a presence. The outside world should feel dangerously close; emphasize that this is a game between two men about women that doesn’t include Their lack of physical appearance should feel like an unanswered question that the men are not confronting because they’re too wrapped up in their game.
• Give that shit a really fun credits sequence!!!

Alright, I’ve soapboxed enough. Please give these movies a try, the 1972 Sleuth is free on YouTube, they’re a great time. We should be doing this every thirty years until the end of time. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

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Maddi Chilton is an internet artifact from St. Louis, Missouri. Follow her on Bluesky.