The Oxford Murders

Off to see the newly released movie “The Oxford Murders.” There were two impulses to see this for as my regular blogistas will know Oxford is one of my favourite places

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/04/day-in-oxford.html

and John Hurt is an actor I’ve long admired and has some Irish connections both real and putative. His elder brother Michael is a monk in Ireland and he used to live with Sara Owen in Co. Wicklow. He long thought of himself as being descended on the “wrong side of the sheet” from the Marquis of Sligo but as the BBC programme “Who do you think you are?” demonstrated this wasn’t true. The Oxford Murders is a 2008 thriller film adapted from an award-winning novel of the same name by the Argentine mathematician and writer Guillermo Martínez, directed by Álex de la Iglesia and starring Elijah Wood, John Hurt, and Leonor Watling.

The proposition of setting a mathematical thriller in Oxford is interesting and has some previous form. A mathematician and Divine of Christchurch College Oxford, Charles Dodgson published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, under the pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier - Lewis Carroll. The texts of Lewis Carroll’s works are littered with mathematics and probability even if Alice gets some of it wrong! The most obvious example in the text where mathematics as we know it is different is when Alice tries to recall basic arithmetic facts when she first falls down the well: “Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!” Also, whilst John Hurt’s father was an Anglican clergyman, he was a mathematician who became a clergyman, so I wouldn’t discount that John Hurt had a personal interest in this part.



The film is set in November 1993. Wood plays Martin, an American student at University of Oxford who wants Arthur Seldom (Hurt) as his thesis director. In a public lecture, Seldom quotes Wittgenstein's Tractatus to deny the possibility of truth. Martin contests this, asserting his faith in the mathematics underlining reality. Later, Martin and Seldom meet by coincidence on the steps of the house where Martin is lodging and find Martin's landlady (also a friend of Seldom's) murdered. It quickly becomes clear that hers is the first in a series of increasingly bizarre murders, with each victim’s corpse marked by strange symbols. Professor and student join forces to try and crack the code, setting into motion an elaborate game with the killer with ever-increasing stakes. As Martin gets closer to the facts, he grows increasingly unhinged from his grasp on the world around him.

Seldom declares to the police that he had received a note with his friend's address marked as "the first of a series". As Seldom is an authority on logical series, he suspects that a serial murderer is defying his intelligence. Martin, Seldom and Lorna (Leonor Watling), a Spanish nurse, will try to guess the following terms of the series as murders continue.


The characters debate several mathematical and philosophical concepts such as logical series, Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty, Gödel's Theorem, circles, the Vesica Piscis, the possibility of perfect crime, "Fermat"'s Last Theorem and its proof by "Professor Wiles", the Taniyama conjecture, the tetraktys and the Pythagoreans.


As you would expect in a mathematical thriller there are several twists but the final twist is one that Seldom precipitates but hadn’t anticipated – I can tell you no more – you need to see for yourself! The characters are well drawn with Hurt playing the ageing professor and Wood the gauche fresher with depth and conviction. Oxford as always provides the most theatrical of backdrops but this is not a sanitized tourist backdrop but a gritty Oxford with an undercurrent of menace. However for me the revelation was the Anglo- Spanish actress and singer Leonor Watling – where has she been all our lives? Leonor Ceballos Watling (born July 28, 1975) is a Spanish film actress and singer. Watling was born in Madrid, Spain, of Spanish and English ancestry. She began her career in theatre and made her début in films when she was 15 with Jardines Colgantes by Pablo Llorca. Lately, she combines film performances with her work in the musical band Marlango. I predict this performance will lead onto greater things.

Leonor Watling

With the amount of math’s going on the pace at times is uneven but the plot is compelling, the performances convincing and the denouement unexpected so a classic thriller well crafted and worth catching.