Luther: The Fallen Sun

The film opens with Luther in a place the series never quite showed him: defeated. He is in prison, disgraced, and the cyber psychopath who got away is still out there taunting him. The taunting is the point. Robey knows exactly which button to press, and Luther, being Luther, responds by doing the one thing guaranteed to make everything worse. He breaks out. The job will not be finished from a cell, and by now he has stopped pretending the law is where he does his best work.

But back in London, the hunt is a personal one. The sadistic serial killer terrorising the city has made it about Luther, and Luther has made it about himself, and the two obsessions feed each other until nobody else matters. The film keeps the focus tight on that single pursuit, and it works. A two-hour Luther story does not need the machinery of a series. It needs one man, one monster, and a city in between.

Neil Cross wrote it, Jamie Payne directed. Idris Elba gives Luther his full weight, and Andy Serkis's David Robey is a properly unnerving villain, the sort of clever, patient sadist who does his damage from a distance. Cynthia Erivo's Odette Raine is the closest thing the film has to a counterweight, a detective who is doing it by the book and is not impressed by the man who is not. Dermot Crowley's Martin Schenk, Thomas Coombes's Archie Woodward, Hattie Morahan's Corinne Aldrich, Lauryn Ajufo's Anya Raine, Vincent Regan's Dennis McCabe, Ross Waiton's Newman and Dan Li's Wong fill out the world around them.

The prison break sets the moral terms. Everything after it is Luther choosing his own rules, and the film never pretends that choice is heroic.

It is grim, self-contained, and exactly as bleak as a Luther story should be. The man was always going to end up outside the law. This is the film where he stays there.