'London Road': Tom Hardy Costars in a Serial-Killer Musical That May Be the Fall's Most Unusual Movie

London Road, a British film opening in New York on Sept. 9, is unlike anything you’ve seen before. It’s a fictionalized documentary, a based-on-a-true-story murder mystery that doesn’t care about the killer’s identity, and a musical in which the dialogue and songs are the same. Also, Tom Hardy’s in it. And it’s great.

Obviously, this a tough one to describe (even the trailer misses the big picture), but let’s give it a go. London Road takes place in Ipswich, a quiet English town where five prostitutes were murdered in 2008. The film is based closely on actual interviews with Ipswich residents — cab drivers, housewives, sex workers, city council members, high school students, and so forth — conducted from the time the murders occurred until the killer was behind bars, and then afterwards, as neighbors banded together to rehabilitate their community. Writer Alecky Blythe turned the verbatim interviews into a play for London’s National Theater, with music by Adam Cork. Over the course of the play (which became the basis for the film), an ensemble of Ipswich residents tries to make sense of the drama happening around them.

Here’s the twist: rather than telling the story in the traditional style of musical theater, with songs that extrapolate the inner feelings of the characters, Blythe and Cork set the actual interviews to music, word-for-word. Every “um” and every stutter becomes a lyric. A typical chorus might be: “Everyone is very very nervous, um, and very unsure of everything, basically.” The melodies mimic the lilt of the Suffolk accent, making the singers sound almost like they’re speaking. The effect is surreal and mesmerizing.

Tom Hardy sings a song adapted from an interview with a serial-killer-obsessed local in a scene from ‘London Road:’

Hardy, of Mad Max: Fury Road and Dark Knight Rises fame, has a small role as a local cab driver who is casually obsessed with serial killers. (Which, let’s face it, a lot of people are.) The real stars are the actors who came to the film directly from the stage, most notably Olivia Colman (Broadchurch) as one of the killer’s neighbors, whose inspiring love for her community is accompanied by a shocking disregard for the victims.

London Road is centered around the killings, but it isn’t really about murder; it’s about the way the shockwaves of the event reverberate in ordinary people’s lives. The murderer isn’t a character in the film, and neither are the victims. Instead, we see the surviving prostitutes who reluctantly remained in Ipswich; the lifelong residents who were so shaken that they moved away; the pensioners who stood watch outside the courthouse like it was their own personal soap opera; and the newscasters who stumbled upon the biggest story of their careers. The film’s best musical number is performed early in London Road by two teenage girls, who sing in giddy whispers about how the killer could be “like, anyone, it could be anyone in here!” They’re terrified and thrilled, and don’t really know the right or wrong way to feel. But after watching London Road, you have to wonder: Does anyone?

London Road will be expanding into more cities and theaters throughout the fall — go here for dates and locations.