Menacingly entertaining thriller, despite the clichés: A Lesson reviewed

The Lesson is a literary thriller that is occasionally heavy-handed but also menacingly entertaining, plus you get Richard E. Grant in his full pomp. That said, when do you not get Richard E. Grant in his full pomp? Has anyone ever seen him at 50 per cent pomp? Has anyone ever come out of the cinema thinking: ‘I wish Richard E. Grant had given it more?’ The monstrous character is his speciality and he is deliciously, marvellously, full-on monstrous here. 

Written by Alex MacKeith and directed by Alice Troughton, The Lesson is very self-aware, always delivering little winks to the audience. It is divided into chapters. It is particularly interested in endings. ‘What makes an ending?’ someone will ask, and by the end you will know. It opens with ‘Prologue’ and a young fella, Liam Somers (Daryl McCormack), being interviewed about his book on stage. The novel, we’re told, tells the story of ‘a fading patriarch presiding over his grief-stricken family’, and what, asks the interviewer, was his inspiration?

We spool back in time to Liam as a fresh English graduate and aspiring writer arriving at the country home of J.M. Sinclair (Grant), Britain’s greatest living novelist, apparently, and he’s certainly done all right for himself. The house is glorious: there’s an ornamental garden, a Monet-style lake, a butler and maids and so on. (Do literary novelists make that kind of money? Maybe he does tie-ins with Jamie Oliver?) His wife Hélène (Julie Delpy) is a cold, enigmatic art curator; there’s a pale, taciturn son, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), who is about to sit his Oxford University entrance exam. Liam has been hired as his tutor. There was another son, Felix, who died but no one talks about him.