Agatha Christie meets Slow Horses—with a bioweapon and a body count. Ben Fortune’s Knightfall turns the cozy English whodunit into a vicious little home-invasion thriller.
The film follows MI5 analyst Ros Knight (Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott), who finds herself marked for death after a botched black-ops raid leaves her with the key to a stolen biological weapon. With assassins closing in, and confusion over who to trust, she retreats to the isolated estate of her estranged father, Charles Knight (Ian Ogilvy), a former spy who’s been out of the game and out of her life for years.
Unfortunately, the game hasn’t forgotten him. As father and daughter try to survive the night while trying to mend their burned bridges, Knightfall mixes spy-movie conspiracy with country-house mystery: questionable loyalties, hidden agendas, and the nagging suspicion that someone close to Ros has been playing her like a chess piece.
While the ensemble cast fully commits, with wild performances from Michael Paré as charming former CIA agent Matthew and Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, who hits her conflicted character notes, the story structure left me wanting. At a lean 82 minutes, however, I almost wished Knightfall to linger longer over its second-half mystery.
Director Ben Fortune gives us the expected MI5 alphabet soup—botched operations, compromised agents, biological weapons, and shadowy figures pulling strings—but there’s an appealingly old-fashioned English whodunit element buried beneath it all.
MI5 analysts monitor a live operation in a scene from Knightfall.
“…finds herself marked for death after a botched black-ops raid leaves her with the key to a stolen biological weapon.”
Knightfall trades polished Poirot interrogations and gently placed bodies in the library for mercenaries kicking down doors, and backstabbing espionage. That paranoia also gives the film a whiff of Slow Horses. Not necessarily in its mordant humor or character depth, but in its decidedly un-Bond-like view of British intelligence. This isn’t tuxedos, casinos, and impossibly expensive gadgets. This spy world feels smaller, grubbier, and populated by people whose loyalties deserve scrutiny.
Cut to the film’s spy-dad, acclaimed actor Ian Ogilvy. Horror devotees like myself know him as scene-stealing Chagall in Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her, and Ogilvy infuses his Charles Knight character with something you can’t manufacture–effortless charisma and trained comedic timing. Ogilvy doesn’t play Knight as a geriatric action hero or grumpy Bogart type. He feels like a man who has spent decades studying liars and is in on a joke nobody else knows.
Ogilvy is the ace up the film’s sleeve, but we’re unfortunately dealt a poor hand full of exposition and less-than-inspired action scenes. There’s a much richer movie hiding inside Charles Knight, and based on the film’s synopsis, it was the story I thought we would get.
Whenever Ogilvy takes command, the film gains instant weight, but just as you want Knightfall to really unleash him, the story shifts its attention elsewhere. For a movie carrying his character’s name, I wanted considerably more Knight in Knightfall.
Still, there’s something charmingly throwback about the whole affair. Knightfall is a scrappy cocktail of Agatha Christie and Slow Horses meets home-invasion nastiness that’s more fun than polished. Its most unforgivable crime? Having Ian Ogilvy in the house and leaving him criminally underused.
"…Knightfall trades polished Poirot interrogations and gently placed bodies in the library for mercenaries kicking down doors, and backstabbing espionage."
