Frank & Lola | Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots in modern film noir

Frank and Lola Michael Shannon Imogen Poots — (Image credit: © 2015 Winant Productions Limit)

With his unnerving gaze and hulking frame, Michael Shannon always gives off a sense of danger. Cast him as a romantic lead and it’s a good bet there will be something combustible about the character he is playing. That’s certainly the case in noir-ish love story Frank & Lola, which sees his volatile Las Vegas chef fall hard for Imogen Poots’s aspiring fashion designer.

At first, theirs is a deliriously swoony affair, but it isn’t long before the green-eyed monster rears its ugly head. And when Frank learns of Lola’s troubled past, and her damaging involvement with a rich European swinger (Michael Nyqvist), his sexual jealousy erupts.

A throwback to the febrile world of 1940s and 50s film noir, writer-director Matthew Ross’s film is undeniably overwrought, but Shannon and Poots’s rapport carries a prickly charge, while The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo actor Nyqvist provides an appropriately nasty reek of Eurostrash sleaze.

Look out, too, for Rosanna Arquette’s brief cameo as Lola’s self-absorbed jet-set journalist mother. She has just one brief scene, but it gives us a telling glimpse of the background of privilege and neglect that went into creating her femme fatale of a daughter.

Certificate 18. Runtime 88 mins. Director Matthew Ross

Frank & Lola debuts on Sky Cinema Premiere on 5 February. Available on DVD & Digital from Universal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0FaxsOAyQg

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.