Blood Orange | Film review - Iggy Pop's rocker goes out with a bang

Punk godfather Iggy Pop takes his first leading movie role in contemporary film noir thriller Blood Orange. But given that he's playing an ageing rocker his part isn't much of a stretch. Still, his craggy cool does work in the film's favour and makes up for his slender thespian skills.

His character is a rich, half-blind recluse who is shacked up with a much younger wife (former Grange Hill starlet Kacey Barnfield playing the film's voluptuous femme fatale) in a stunning modernist villa somewhere in Spain.

"Slipping out of grasp"

With a resentful, disinherited stepson (Ben Lamb) and a hunky pool boy (Antonio Magro) thrown into the mix, the plot twists this way and that, the characters' motives always slipping out of grasp. Yet the viewer will probably be a jump ahead of the plot, all the same.

It's very stylishly filmed, but first-time writer-director Toby Tobias's script isn't tight enough for his movie to keep us fully in its grip.

Certificate 15. Runtime 83 mins. Director Toby Tobias

Blood Orange debuts on Sky Cinema Premiere on Thursday 2 March and is available on DVD from Metrodome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zYaA3V2KXY

CATEGORIES

A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.