I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Gemma Arterton, ever since she crossed my path in the 2010s, in films like Tamara Drewe and Byzantium. She was a Bond girl briefly too, called Strawberry Fields.
Since those heady days we haven’t seen so much of her, which may have been why I was drawn to the chilling Rogue Agent at the British Film Festival.
Photo: Screenshot
Arterton plays Alice, a smart, successful lawyer who you’d think would be too smart to be taken in by a conman.
But the point of Rogue Agent is that nobody’s too smart, if the conman is determined and ruthless enough. Particularly one with a convincing tale.
Rogue Agent opens with a two-line setup. It’s England in 1993, with the country going through another series of IRA bomb-scares.
We’re told the under-resourced security services were forced to take on freelance informers. Which makes the tale told by one Robert Hansen aka Robert Freegard at least plausible.
When Alice meets the charming Robert – played by James Norton – he’s selling luxury cars. The way he so deftly reels her in should have warned her perhaps.
It’s funny – one minute she wants nothing to do with this smooth operator, next she’s driving with him in a fast car with the hood down. How did that happen, she asks herself when it was too late.
Maybe it’s the fact he always seems to be holding something back, he’s a man with a secret.
Which means it’s flattering when he finally trusts her enough to tell all. No wonder he was so guarded. He’s actually a top spy.
The fact that Robert Freegard could make this convincing, and then could keep Alice on his side for so long is so unbelievable it has to be true, and so it transpires.
At the same time he was stringing Alice along, he was also maintaining relationships with at least three other women.
The two directors Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson came from a BBC current affairs background before they turned to drama based on fact. Before this they made two riveting TV series, The Salisbury Poisonings and The Undeclared War.
Rogue Agent was based on an article by Peabody Award-winning journalist Michael Bronner.
The story is accurate enough – the truth apparently is even more outlandish, I believe – but it’s the performances that sell Rogue Agent. Norton is unnerving, because he plays Robert exactly the way he played the saintly father in the film Nowhere Special.
And Arterton develops a visible steely backbone when she starts to suspect the secret agent has more secrets than he’s letting on.
Belatedly Alice hires a private eye – a neat little performance from Julian Barrett – who tells her what she doesn’t want to hear. And also, that she’s not the first to fall for the Talented Mr Freegard.
A thriller– even a true-crime thriller like Rogue Agent – can only truly grip if there’s a little more to it than simply cat and mouse. How did he do it? How did he get away with it? And if women like Alice go along with it – even unwittingly – at what stage does it become a crime?
Above all, Rogue Agent is about how easily we can be fooled.
People like Freegard tell us stories we want to believe. Like the story we were told at the start of this film, in fact.
Remember that MI5 occasionally called in amateurs – people like you and me – to take part in glamorous missions? We believed that, didn’t we? But was it actually true?
