The Limehouse Golem

This post-modern, self-reflexive horror film is about the audience’s hunger for horror.
The opening scene introduces the film’s story as a music hall performance, announced by the period comedian Dan Leno. Later Inspector Kildare speaks of the public’s craving for sensationalism, for gore, which the plot generously provides. The rabid press embodies the public’s craving for the horrific.

When Leno states he will start the story at the end, a strategy repeated in the later staging of the monster’s supposed demise, he implicitly roots the story in our time. The film like its plot moves back in time. 

  Several modern themes are woven back into the Victorian fiction: Kildare’s career freeze due to his suspected homosexuality (“He’s not the marrying kind”) and his aide’s later implication; the sexual fluidity in Leno’s and in heroine Lizzie’s theatrical acts; the psychological damage done by early poverty and abuse; the latent antisemitism in British culture; the mobilization as suspects of well-known historical figures Leno, George Gissing and Karl Marx; Lizzie’s feminist ambitions and values, especially as she turns her marriage into a theatrical staging with radical inflections of the usual husband and wife roles. 

In fact, the running theme of characters playing roles, “performing” rather than “being,” in life as on stage, may be the film’s central motif. The theatrical characters are always posing, and for all their pretence to family often “plotting” against each other. The line between reality and fiction deliberately blurs when the so-called Golem’s bloody murders are replayed with each suspect cast in turn as the killer. Here possibility is played out as actual occurrence.   

The central role of Klldare is significantly given to Bill Nighy, an actor primarily known for the comedy of befuddlement. He is as modern a character as his antithesis, the adventurous and rule-breaking Lizzie is. Assigned to solve the Golem murders, he is diverted by his sensitivity to save Lizzie from her charge of killing her husband. He recovers his dashed reputation by salvaging her honour.

  But Kildare destroys the evidence of her wider guilt. He early expresses his confidence that there must be a coherence among all the Limehouse murders, “the story.” At the end he has, he knows, his story. 

But its implications are too disturbing, too dangerous, for him to unleash. He prefers to let Lizzie die with her honour restored and the true Golem killer’s identity concealed. As the truth has profoundly shocked him, he protects the public from it for the general good. Perhaps that’s why his name recalls the popular soap character Dr. Kildare, with its healing functions outweighing any detective role. 
     Simply, Kildare opts not to expose the threat of a rampant Woman. Horrors we may crave, but not one that so challenges our traditional gender politics.