The Young Poisoner's Handbook

Less a black comedy than a tragedy told with wicked glee and satirising the drabness of English lower middle-class society, writer-director Benjamin Ross’s debut feature tells the macabre real life story of a young Londoner, Graham Young (Hugh O'Conor), who poisoned his step-mother and attempted to poison his sister and father, was sent to Broadmoor and released after nine years, whereupon he started poisoning his fellow employees, two of whom died.

Recalling Dennis Potter’s fondness for gallows humour but stylistically above all indebted to Kubrick’s A  Clockwork Orange, not least in the prominent use of Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 in D Minor, the story is narrated by Young  who in his calm and careful tones explains how he carried out his dastardly deeds with the clinical detachment of a laboratory experiment.  Ross chooses to portray Graham as a polite, solicitous, even sweet, young man and a plot development involving a Dr. Zeigler (Antony Sher), who deludedly thinks that he has cured Young doesn’t break this self-contained surface. The effect is to take something away from the real darkness of the story and makes the film feel slighter than it should have been (while in prison, the real Young befriended the infamous Moors murderer, Ian Brady, with whom he shared a fascination for Nazi lore).

FYI: The film has Young commit suicide although his recorded cause of death in prison aged 41 was  a heart attack.

 

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