Hidden City review – Stephen Poliakoff’s convoluted 1980s mystery told with flair

Poliakoff’s first film starring Charles Dance is reissued, and whil the story rambles and some of the acting isn’t great, it retains a confident power to intrigue

There is great archival and historical interest to the 1987 feature film debut of writer-director Stephen Poliakoff, which now on re-release. It is a peculiar, cerebral and often strangely toothless mystery drama with some pretty wooden acting, but also some fascinating, secret London locations, used with flair. These include the Kingsway tram tunnel – gateway to a veritable catacomb of secret spaces under the city – and the gigantic Edmonton incinerator (now the Edmonton EcoPark). Hidden City offers points of interest in its drama; chiefly, the assertive and characteristically haughty performance from Charles Dance as an educational psychologist who stumbles on an occult conspiracy. Dance incidentally has the most outrageously handbags-at-dawn fight with Bill Paterson (“Mind the suit!”) – an un-macho showdown to be compared with Hugh Grant scrapping with Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Dance plays James Richards, an academic who while showing a film to a class of schoolkids in a lecture theatre with video monitors at every desk, is annoyed to see the wrong footage is being shown. In an imperious fit of pique, he demands that the archive fire whoever is responsible, who turns out to be mouthy researcher Sharon (Cassie Stuart). She tracks Richards down and demands that he help her solve a sinister puzzle: she has turned up surveillance footage of what appears to be a woman being kidnapped in the street by government agents.