FILM HARRY MOUNT
THE TROUBLE WITH JESSICA (15)
Think of the worst dinner party you've ever been to. Then multiply the desperation by a thousand.
That's the premise of The Trouble with Jessica. At a smart professionals’ dinner party in fashionable London, uninvited guest Jessica (Indira Varma) turns up, is rude to everyone – and promptly stomps out into the garden to hang herself.
It gets worse. The hosts, Sarah (a marvellously neurotic Shirley Henderson) and Tom (Alan Tudyk, a fine mixture of smugness and despair), were on the verge of selling their dream house – with its vast, echoing, metallic kitchen, perfect for show-off kitchen suppers.
But the scandal of a suicide in the garden might jeopardise the sale – a disaster because, beneath the sleek, rich surface of their lives, Sarah and Tom are on the verge of financial ruin.
And so they decide the best thing to do is to cover up the death of their embarrassing old friend, Jessica.
The skeleton of this black comedy is completed by the other guests – the glamorous friends, Richard (Rufus Sewell) and Beth (Olivia Williams). Their comfortable middle-class existence is threatened, too, by the decision over what to do with Jessica.
The result is a kind of Whitehall farce meets Patrick Hamilton's Rope – how do you get through an evening with your friends and frenemies with a dead body on the premises?
It's a brilliant set-up, with the farcical twists and turns deftly set up by director, Matt Winn, with his co-screenwriter, James Handel. The chops
