London Fields

The London Fields movie is a noir murder thriller based on Martin Amis's novel of the same title.

Like the book, Mathew Cullen’s version of London Fields depicts a London that looks remarkably like today or, rather, tomorrow; the setting contains enough recognizable landmarks to appear contemporary, but things are heightened and exaggerated with the threat of an unnamed crisis hanging over everything. The landscape alternates between ultra-modernism and decay.

London Fields invites the audience to play the voyeur, to be a fly on the wall in the life of Nicola Six (Amber Heard), a world-weary clairvoyant femme fatale who is waiting to be murdered. Nicola knows death will come for her on her birthday, and she knows it will be at the hands of one of her lovers… but which one?

The cast of characters (and suspects) in London Fields includes:

Keith Talent (Jim Sturgess) - a petty criminal and avid dart player who is desperately trying to avoid the loan shark he owes money.

Guy Clinch (Theo James) - a bored millionaire who values innocence, propriety, and “niceness,” yet is cheating on his wife with Nicola.

Samson Young (Billy Bob Thornton) - an American author who sees Nicola and her impending death as a cure for his writer’s block.

Nicola plays these men, especially Keith and Guy, against each other as she masterfully works her way toward her own demise. For each of the three men, she becomes a different woman and offers an escape from their day-to-day lives.

Sam believes Nicola represents the perfect heroine for the book he is desperate to write before his own death. With her permission, he begins watching her, and as Nicola tells Chick Purchase (Johnny Depp), she loves to be watched.

Sam begins to weave a tale based on Nicola—or Nicola as he imagines her to be. Which events are real and which are merely figments of the fatally ill Sam’s imagination? In London Fields, the audience is tasked with determining where reality ends and fiction begins, and maybe it doesn’t even matter. As Mark Asprey (Jason Isaacs), a famous writer whose flat Sam is staying in says, “Truth doesn’t matter anymore… and is not wanted.”