Strictly Confidential: Elizabeth Hurley’s whodunnit is more Austin Powers than Agatha Christie
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In the what-did-I-just-see murder mystery Strictly Confidential, the camera might as well be wielded by Austin Powers in “yeah baby!” mode: it has the same campy fixation on Elizabeth Hurley’s breasts.
What’s weirder, and even more laughable, is that this was written and directed by Hurley’s 22-year-old son Damian, who got his mum to produce, star, totter around a Caribbean island in high heels during flashbacks to unexplained deaths, and even cavort in a partially nude heavy petting scene with a secret girlfriend half her age.
Nothing about the film makes sense, but it’s charmingly terrible – a sort of I Know Who You Shagged Last Summer, to borrow another Austin-ism.
It begins a year after the drowning of a young woman named Rebecca (Lauren McQueen), one of the two daughters of Hurley’s sexy widow. All Rebecca’s near and dear come back on the anniversary of her demise, including best friend Mia (Georgia Lock), the only one for whom grief seems to cut particularly deep.
The six members of the principal cast are methodically paired off for sex scenes – one between the deceased’s sister and her ex, say – all of which have the kind of sudsy slo-mo eroticism which the curious might have found on late night Channel 5 around 1999.
Insanely, this film’s putative auteur wasn’t even born at that point: his film can only be classified, then, as an accidental relic or pastiche, much as it may yearn to look up-to-date with incessant drone shots of whichever corner of the St Kitts & Nevis coastline the Hurleys borrowed to shoot it.
Deadly secrets are spilled with the lackadaisical plop of a daytime soap. The absurd title refers to a local psychotherapist’s case file on Rebecca, who used Mia’s name as a pseudonym rather than thinking up a fake one – one of many delightful head-scratchers. She also named her unborn baby after six weeks, and again, called it Mia, suggesting both a unhinged obsession with her BFF and some seriously dazzling advances in ultrasound tech.
This is like picking holes in a mesh crop-top. The script’s so creaky it often sounds AI-generated: “What if that is the bad situation from her letter?” asks a perma-pained Mia about Rebecca’s suicide note. I lost count of the moments when someone’s head swivels in shock, or the number of framed portraits littering the mansion to remind us who was officially in a relationship with whom.
Hurley fils may not yet have given us a fully-realised answer to Tommy Wiseau’s infamous trash-fire vanity project The Room, but these are, if you like, nepo baby steps towards that.
15 cert, 88 min. On digital download from May 13
