After being spurned - unfairly, she feels - by Mr. Malcolm (Sope Dirisu), Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton) brings her childhood friend Selina Dalton (Frieda Pinto) to London in the hope that she will meet the requirements of his so-called list of attributes for a partner and then spurn him just the same. However, as their relationship grows, Selina comes to realise that Mr. Malcolm has the qualities she has looked for and found lacking in other partners...
With the help of 'Bridgerton' and corners of the internet, the Regency movie is enjoying a return to fortune. Joe Wright's 'Pride and Prejudice' staked out the high echelons of the genre, but you'll just as easily find clangers like the utterly misguided 'Persuasion' with Dakota Johnson. In between all this is the ever-pervasive 'Bridgerton'. Yet, colour blind casting in Regency movies is nothing new and 'Mr. Malcolm's List' began life as a short a few years before 'Bridgerton' came sweeping to power, with much of the same cast here. It's only now that it's been given the full feature treatment, and it's all to the better of it.
Director Emma Holly Jones, in her debut feature, commands the screen with an assuredness beyond her years. There's effectiveness at work in where the camera is placed and how the lighting is arranged which speaks to both a familiarity with how these movies are presented and how to adhere to them without it being repetitive. The likes of the aforementioned 'Pride and Prejudice' are clear touchstones, but it's in Suzanne Allain's script that 'Mr. Malcolm's List' stakes out its position. On the surface, it could read like fan fiction, and it is to a certain degree, but Allain interrogates and picks apart some of the most glaring aspects of the Regency movie in a way that's almost a little too clever for its own good.
The cast is headed by a double-act of Frieda Pinto and Zawe Ashton, the former playing the kind-hearted friend to the latter's conniving social climber. In between them is Sope Dirisu, the titular list-holder who very cleverly plays his role as the target of the romance but also the antagonist. His character's arrogance is moulded in such a way that it makes sense without overplaying it. Theo James and Oliver Jackson-Cohen provide much of the support, with Jackson-Cohen, in particular, more than able to pull off the comedy relief aspects of the whole movie with ease.
Pinto and Ashton play off each other with ease, with Ashton soaking up the screen as the prickly mean girl-type and displaying a sharp sense of comedic timing in her performance. Pinto's performance, meanwhile, has a real air of innocence about it that mercifully doesn't come off as cloying as it often can in these things.
Like any list, 'Mr. Malcolm's List' does tend to grow long in the telling, and you get the sense that it could lose at least twenty minutes of its runtime and be the better for it. Still, it's a well-made, handsome addition to a genre that's had more than its share of failures in recent years.
