Executioner is a smart, efficient little four-hander of a movie, based on the 2007 stage play Deadlock by Peter Benedict. The polymath Benedict starred in the original play, also stars here, wrote the film adaptation, and co-directed it. He’s also on-screen for essentially the entire running time, with the action taking place in one room as the other characters come and go.
Benedict’s character, Robert Marlowe, is a married, closeted MP. He’s built an underground den within his secluded home, to which he brings his male hookups. Within the first ten minutes, he has a dead young man (Max Raphael) in his home following an accident with erotic asphyxiation. Enter his PA/factotum, ex-military man Mark (Christian Greenway), to help him dispose of the body in a convenient incinerator of the sort built for the Holocaust, and all the while he’s trying to keep his wife (Christina Cole) from discovering anything – but it soon turns out that all is not as it seems, and the film becomes an ever-shifting web of deceptions, a game of “I know, but you don’t know that I know”.
Your enjoyment of Executioner may depend on your tolerance for that kind of thing. For me, after a rather shaky first act, it settled into a mostly very enjoyable, if far-fetched little puzzle box of a film. The dialogue is overwrought at times – Marlowe is written as a somewhat pompous character, but the verbosity grates at times. Or maybe it’s just that Benedict is working a little too hard to sell the character, whose upper-crust accent doesn’t seem to come naturally to the actor. Greenway and Raphael do better with more natural performances, and Christina Cole does a fine job in a surprisingly small rôle – her character is talked about more frequently than she actually talks. But overall if you’re willing to just go along with it, Executioner is a nicely-constructed stage play that you can watch from the comfort of your living room.