Murder by Decree begins with a somewhat staid, formalistic opera scene, something that could feel at home in any prestige-caked period piece. Just as the viewer is being lulled into a historical stupor, the film intercuts a POV shot of an apparent killer on the path to fresh meat. It’s not just a juxtaposition but an incision. The film sneaks up behind us to cut our throat. Just as we feel straightjacketed by bourgeois society, Murder by Decree unleashes its repressed id.

We are reminded that the name on the tin is Bob Clark, here repurposing one of his most famous, fiendish cinematic innovations, the Steadicam killer-POV from Black Christmas. Clark, on the path to the milquetoast ‘80s triviality of his later works, has recast his passage from scabrous social critic to mundane social chronicler into a single-scene conundrum. It’s as if his earlier style – lacerating, lonesome – is here present not as the bones of the film but the invasive species. The conformist, commonplace mausoleum of a film style Clark would soon adopt has been ransacked by the live energy of his younger self, a dangerous outsider wandering the Canadian wilderness and scouring for signs of decay. The dark flight of the killer signals a disruptive force, the intrusion of a homeless, cast-aside horror film into the propertied world of a mainstream costume drama. Clark, precipiced between his earlier cinema and his later cinema, turns the very tipping point between them not only into a return of his own repressed cinematic past, but, when we eventually come to question which figure – the lone killer or the structure of decorum – is able to cause more harm, a moving meditation on the limits of the horror genre itself. If we’re so afraid of a killer stalking modernity’s streets, the film ponders, will we recognize the violence of the men who built them?

Indeed, the film’s real coup is that even the point of view shots obfuscate more than they reveal. While they promise the Pavlovian thrill of the lone killer, Murder by Decree in fact exposes the limits of this very formula, of our cinematic faith in the idea of a single detective weaving through the tangle of an increasingly deceptive world to winnow down his sights on a central, culpable figure fugitive to that world’s accepted rules. On the foggy cobblestones of a shifting world, Murder by Decree argues that our defining narratives of crime and punishment prove hopelessly inadequate for a world in which the very fabric of society is implicated. What Clark is really up to is far more devious than simply smuggling a grisly, grotty horror film into a period drama. Murder ponders the adequacy of the Sherlock Holmes story in an evasive world in which the finality promised by the notion of a single culprit may be the nastiest crime of all. It gives us a world in which the contours of the crime are framed for us by a system looking for scapegoats, windowed by a conspiracy that is too big to capture, and yet too dangerous and disturbing to not to reconcile yourself too. By the conclusion, Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer) and Dr. Watson (James Mason) confront Lord Salisbury (John Gielguld, canny casting of a master thespian as a charismatic overlord), not Jack the Ripper. What begins as a fencing match, pitting Victorian England’s most famous detective against its most famous killer, finally interrogates this structure and finds it inadequate to the mechanisms of control in the world we inhabit.

None of this is unprecedented. Robert Altman let a laconic, loose band of a detective who seems more interested in searching for cat food than reckoning with the depths of depravity in the society around him run amok through Los Angeles. Clark’s film is more conservative in its style and cautious in its perspective, an exemplar coloring inside the lines of the genre rather than turning its world upside down. The film’s interest is its attempt to turn that judiciousness against itself, to reconfigure the meaning of the famously personalizing, implicating texture of his devilish Black Christmas. In that early slasher classic, his camera ran rampant, sweating and heaving through a college sorority with malicious intent and genuine sympathy and interest in its female protagonists. There, the camera models our own sinister intent, implicating us in its gaze. Here, the camera lies to us, inviting us into a story of lascivious individualism that finally minimizes just who the real culprits are, just how deep the violence can go. Its truth is found in the claustrophobic corridors of London but actually derives from the world around it, a vicious sliver that, like Poe’s vision of Usher, opens up and sucks up the entire foundations of the society. Like the dreaded, crestfallen manse in Poe’s story, Murder by Decree cracks cinema’s house wide open. Truth be told, Murder by Decree doesn’t fully overcome its middlebrow bonafides –  a lot of it feels like the work of a consummate professional rather than a zealous outsider – but the implications of its story, and the uncanny quality of Clark’s capacity to insidiously sicken the story he is telling from the inside feel, by the film’s end, nearly cataclysmic.

Score: 7.5/10