Wealthy diamond merchant Sir Cyril Landau (Patrick Macnee) gets an unusual visitor: a motor mechanic named Oliver Shadey (Antony Sher). Shadey has a very specific proposition—he wants £25,000 for a sex change operation, and in exchange, he’s willing to trade his rare psychic skill. His talent? The ability to mentally view remote locations and record those visions directly onto film.
Meanwhile, Shadey’s psychic radar picks up on domestic chaos, making predictions about Sir Cyril’s mentally unbalanced wife, Lady Constance (Katherine Helmond), and their model daughter, Carol (Leslie Ash). Soon, Carol heads off to Belgium for a music video shoot (“Love Is Burning” by Jonathan Perkins Silver Spurs) and gets tangled up with her director. Things take a dark, twisted turn when Shadey views one of his mental films capturing a deeply troubling incident: a drunken Sir Cyril committing incest with Carol. Instead of dealing with the fallout, Sir Cyril trades Shadey over to MI5 in exchange for a shiny set of new offices. But Shadey wants nothing to do with espionage work, prompting MI5 to try and drug him into compliance, while entirely ignoring the original agreement he made with Sir Cyril.
This UK oddity from 1985 was directed by Philip Saville (The Life and Loves of a She-Devil) and written by Snoo Wilson. Behind the camera, legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins handled the photography. Saville came straight to this project off the massive success of the acclaimed 1982 TV mini-series The Boys from the Blackstuff, which likely explains how he managed to secure financing and a stellar cast for such an uncompromised, eccentric vision. Shadey was only ever given a minimal theatrical screening in England upon release, largely because audiences and distributors didn’t quite know what to make of its slippery genre-hopping tone.
It’s a weird bag, a movie that seemingly goes from comedy to intense drama, often in the same scene, and then has an ending which seems to throw its hands up in the air and ends things like a child forced to put away its toys before bed. I’m still trying to piece it all together, as everything from the dinner sequence to the tunnel under Shadey’s house to the elevator seems like dreams, including the ending. How did Sir Cyril survive? Does his wife know what’s happening? Is Shadey alive?
What a strange film. I loved it and yet I don’t know who I’d recommend it to.
