JUST DESERTS

Writer/director John Michael McDonagh turns his misanthropic lens on wealthy westerners forced into atonement for their fatal nonchalance amid Morocco’s sand dunes in The Forgiven. McDonagh and his stars, Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain, tell Total Film why we’re still fascinated by cinema’s terrible people.

- JANE CROWTHER

They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” So wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925’s The Great Gatsby of his monied characters, and in John Michael McDonagh’s adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2012 bestselling novel, it seems little has changed in the intervening decades for the two-percenters at the heart of his lean – and mean – thriller.

Following an affluent married couple, David and Jo Henninger (Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain) as they drive – sozzled – from Casablanca to Azner to attend an opulent weekend party, The Forgiven charts the emotional and moral fallout when the pair hit and kill a Moroccan teen and arrive at the soiree with his body in the back seat. Though it does little to dent the bacchanalian vibe of rich party-giver Richard (Matt Smith), the death prompts the boy’s grief-stricken father (Ismael Kanater) to arrive, demanding reparation from David and triggering a journey of epiphany for both spouses.

Peopled by unapologetic, blunt-talking characters and bringing up themes of racism, colonialism and wealth disparity, it’s a project comfortably in the wheelhouse of The Guard, Calvary and War On Everyone writer/director McDonagh, who optioned the book when he read it. “Am I drawn to unsympathetic characters?” he muses with a shrug over a pint in a central London cinema bar. “Unsympathetic characters, a great plot, and a bleak ending. It’s probably what attracted me.” A plain-speaking man himself who refuses to carry a phone, McDonagh is unwilling to varnish his discussion of his project during