Double Date – Review

29-year-old Jim (Danny Morgan) is nearing his birthday, which will make him a 30-year-old virgin, something unacceptable to his friend Alex (Michael Socha), who is apparently nicknamed “the dick” at work, and not because of his sexual prowess. Alex sets out to help Jim get laid, which in practice means going from bar to bar making hopelessly terrible small-talk with strangers, Alex’s attempts to share tips on picking up women almost always hindering rather than helping. But finally, they encounter a pair of foxy, confident girls who seem unusually keen to get to know them and take them home. You know how it goes, single women often lament that all the best men are either taken or gay, whereas for single men it’s, all the best women are either uninterested or trying to sacrifice you in an occult ritual.

Satanists in the movies often have no clear discernible motivation for all the spooky devilry they get up to, which is only exacerbated in films which show the side-effects of consorting with spirits to be distinctly unpleasant. Refreshingly, Double Date gives the sisters a clear, and solid, motivation for their antics (which I shan’t spoil here). This is not to say that it makes them sympathetic; while Lulu (Georgia Groome) has her reservations about what they’re doing, Kitty (Kelly Wenham) is spectacularly wicked, Wenham delivering a hilariously unhinged, unnervingly sexy and plain evil performance that’s the best one in the film. But the rest of the cast are strong too. Danny Morgan – who also wrote the film – has some experience playing luckless nice guys, though he maybe oversells slightly just how uncharismatic and bland Jim is. Better is Michael Socha, who breathes life into what might on paper have been a stock character – basically, a colossal berk of a sexist, boozy lad – and manages to remain believable and funny while embroiled in an unusually brutal fight against Kitty. Movies are hesitant to show men and women fighting each other at all, let alone fighting with the sort of extreme black-comedy violence that we see here. That scene is the movie’s best setpiece, but it’s not the only one worthy of note. The script, to its credit, takes its sweet time getting its characters out of London and into the girls’ delightfully Gothic mansion in the countryside, a number of bad-luck – or is that good luck? – incidents threatening to keep them from ever getting there. Rarely has a movie taken so much care, and generated so much joy, in simply getting characters from A to B.

Benjamin Barfoot, directing his first feature, makes a convincing case for himself as an emerging British talent. He shoots Double Date like an art film in places, despite its basically knockabout premise, lending a gravitas to material that weaker directors might have cheapened by a muggish slapstick approach. Aside from the aforementioned fight scene, other highlights include Wenham kicking the shit out of a mannequin with such force the audience may feel battered; a bit of breathlessly stylish editing intercutting Jim and Alex’s night-out preparations with the more sinister ones of Kitty and Lulu; and a bonkers climax played with all the glee of Sam Raimi at his gleefulest. But Barfoot doesn’t only shine in the louder, in-your-face moments; his evocation of the depressing, wanky nature of London nightlife is spot on, and I’m something of an expert in London wankery. It’s too early to say whether Barfoot will be recognised alongside such Brit genre talents as Danny Boyle, Edgar Wright or Ben Wheatley, but Double Date delivers just as much brutality and just as many belly-laughs.