Picking up six years after the first installment, 1980 finds us looking at the police officers in charge of finding the Yorkshire Ripper, and discovering only lip service being paid to the public. Why bother finding a serial killer when it may tie into a corrupted activity that you or your best friends are actively participating in. That wouldn’t just look bad for the police force, but the elected officials that they lie in bed with (metaphorically). Due to a very public backlash, they have called in an outsider to investigate accusations of corrupt and general incompetence. Do I really need to explain that this only ends in sheer devastation and grief for this poor soul thrust into the middle of this destructive force? You’ve seen the first film; there are no happy endings here.
Like the previous film, 1980 rests a bulk of the film on one central performance, so the pass/fail nature of the film is just as high. Luckily Paddy Considine is more than up to the challenge. Knowing him primarily from Hot Fuzz, I was pretty astounded by his depth of feeling and commitment to the seriousness and melancholia of the work. From the first moment that he is on the screen he is perfectly in character and radiating out a desperate isolation from life.
And like Considine’s minimalist performance, director James Marsh places his camera and utilizes the 35mm film to play his chess game close to the bone. 1980 doesn’t have the stylistic exercises that distracted from 1974’s taunt premise or the random bits of ultra-violence. Instead, it tightly wraps us corridors and close-ups, making us a complicit part of this game by removing any distance and making us stare out with Considine as he quietly tries to make sense and piece the mysteries all together. Would it by hyperbolic to say that the second film in a trilogy is always the best? Well, 1980 is certainly not the exception to that rule. It’s the best of the three, hands down.