Beneath the garishly brittle portrait of ghastly westerners lording it up in Morocco, there’s a low-key, brooding quality to this accomplished if somewhat inert screen adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2012 bestseller. Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, whose screen CV includes The Guard (2011), Calvary (2014) and War on Everyone (2016), it’s an anxiously moralist tale of crime and punishment, revenge and resolution, played out against a broad-strokes, culture-clash backdrop that brings a tang of spiteful satire to the deeper discussions of good and evil.
“It’s a long way to go for a party, but then they’re more your friends than mine.” So says David (Ralph Fiennes), a British doctor with a blemished record whom we first meet aboard a boat to “l’Afrique” with his wife, Jo (Jessica Chastain, who co-starred with Fiennes in his 2011 Coriolanus). She’s an unproductive children’s author who has fallen from favour with her young readers – an audience she detests. He is a “highly functioning alcoholic”, a phrase he likens to a double negative, as if one cancels out the other.
They’re off to the ksour (“it means castle”) of Richard (a louche Matt Smith) and Dally (Caleb Landry Jones, all pouting petulance) – a debauched party villa restored by the “little Moroccans” to whom the owners patronisingly profess to owe so much. But while driving drunk through the desert during a marital squabble, David hits and kills a young boy whose broken body is brought to the party. The boy’s name is Driss, but no one knows that – yet. For now, he is just “a nobody from a village far away”; someone whose death can be swept under the carpet as an unfortunate accident. David and Jo’s callous hosts seem to agree, reassuring their guests that all will be well with the authorities as long as they seem “overwhelmingly contrite”, something David agrees he can muster if “it’s absolutely necessary”.