DEATH AND THE COMPASS

In a nightmare city inhabited only by criminals and police, DEATH AND THE COMPASS follows a philosophical detective named Lönnrot and his arch-nemesis, a criminal mastermind named Red Scharlach. Investigating the murder of a Talmudic scholar, Lönnrot follows a sequence of metaphysical clues which plunge him into the esoteric world of Jewish mysticism. Is he on the trail of something big, or is he being lured into a fiendish trap?

For this film version of the story by Jorge Luis Borges, made for the BBC, director Alex Cox chose his favorite studio in Mexico City as workplace. As a result he was able, in his own words, to make a film with a modest budget yet enormous production value. Where Borges is deliberately dry, even deadpan, Cox here deploys his most striking visual stylization, with dark, saturated colors, elaborate camera movement, video imagery and baroque sets and costumes. Surprisingly faithful to the individual beats of the original story’s elegantly twisting-and-turning plot, even as Cox’s anarchic mise-en-scène feels like it’s been beamed in from a wholly other wavelength; the delirium of the latter, however improbably, proving an effective fit for the former’s extravagant sense of all-consuming paranoia.