Netflix’s Luther movie makes the Idris Elba cop show bigger, wilder, weirder, and uglier

polygon.com:

Luther: The Fallen Sun is a wild way to continue a BBC series.The show, centering on antihero John Luther (Idris Elba), has featured many unhinged villains over its five seasons, including dice-rolling Dungeons & Dragons fans, killer heart surgeons, and Satanic blood-drinkers. Netflix’s feature-length continuation pushes even further. Luther is a policeman who’s so violent, the only way to justify his vigilante actions is to put him up against the most heinous and outlandish crimes imaginable. This time out, he faces a cyber-savvy killer played by Andy Serkis. He’s a nearly omnipotent internet villain, bombastic and as oversized as the movie’s Netflix budget likely was. This is the most deranged dip into Luther’s world yet.

Directed by Jamie Payne and written by series creator Neil Cross, The Fallen Sun begins with a perfect example of the sort of nightmare-inducing setup that made Luther such a hit. A young man, Calum, gets an ominous call from a stranger, blackmailing him into driving to an isolated location. But he’s waylaid by something horrific in a sequence that’ll immediately join the annals of Luther’s best scares. This bleak start to the story sparks a cat-and-mouse conflict between Luther and the blackmailer, David Robey (Serkis). But while the man behind the killings is terrifying — and extremely theatrical, with Serkis bringing him to life via some powerfully bad wigs — the real goal is to make viewers scared of the way he uses the internet to find and target his victims.

The central premise — an extremely online killer who manipulates people by threatening to expose their secrets — taps into some familiar human fears about exposure and public shaming. Netflix viewers have seen this setup before, in the