4 stars (out of 5)
Benedict Cumberbatch is very much the man of the moment despite his silly name, and he’s masterly as Alan Turing in this very English effort from director Morten Tyldum (whose last outing was the very Norwegian filming of Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters). Wearing dentures and adopting a prat-like accent, Benedict (who’s supposedly Turing’s actual 17th cousin) plays this brilliant mathematician as a truly impossible figure: alienating and anti-social, unable to understand jokes, hopeless with emotions and gay at a very dangerous time.
Opening in 1951, we watch as Detective Robert Nock (Rory Kinnear) investigates an apparent break-in at Turing’s Manchester home and grows suspicious due to his strange behaviour. Nock thinks Turing might be a spy and is intrigued to find his war record erased, but the secret is much simpler than that, and we cut back and forth between Turing’s testimony, his time as a bullied schoolboy (here he’s played by Alex Lawther) in 1922 and his work at Bletchley Park during World War 2. Turing signed up to be one of a group of cryptographers super-secretly assigned to crack the Nazis’ ‘Enigma Code’, and Graham Moore’s screenplay (adapting Andrew Hodges’ book-long study) surprisingly wrings much humour from our protagonist’s inability to deal with his commanding officers and other code-breakers (the most developed and likeable of whom is Matthew Goode’s caddish Hugh Alexander). With the support of the Home Office and (to a point) Commander Denniston (ham-free Charles Dance) and Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong), Turing is given 100,000 pounds to build a machine which will supposedly be able to crack the ever-changing Enigma, and it’s a beautiful apparatus, closely based upon the real thing and virtually delivering an actual performance itself. The war drags on, however, and Denniston, in particular, turns against Turing, and Turing grows close to fellow cryptographer Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), who eventually looks like she might be forced to withdraw from the war effort and return home as she’s 25 and unmarried (imagine that!!!).
With excellent playing from Knightley and Goode (old pals of Benedict’s), splendid stiff-upper-lip work from Dance and Strong, lovely historical detail and much suspense (even though we couldn’t possibly truly understand how the legendary code actually worked), this is nevertheless, of course, all about Cumberbatch’s Alan, and what an enigma he was – even to himself.
I Wake Up Screening 