After Quentin Tarantino’s unfavourable comments about the actor’s performance in films including There Will Be Blood, we run through the roles that show just how potent he really is
This disquieting narrative debut from the British director James Marsh (The Theory of Everything) is a kind of minor Cape Fear. Gael García Bernal plays a sociopathic outsider threatening the apparently perfect life of his long-lost preacher father (William Hurt). In what now looks like a dry run for There Will Be Blood, Dano is the earnest son campaigning for creationism to be taught at school, and sideswiped by the emergence of his sinister half-brother. Variety labelled the film “noxious”. It’s undoubtedly nasty, but Dano helps to lend it a pulse.
Superficially macabre, this buddy-movie with Dano as the stranded shipwreck survivor and Daniel Radcliffe as the corpse who washes ashore is surprisingly touching. Sure, it is full of the sort of manufactured eccentricity that would reach fever pitch in the same directors’ next film, Everything Everywhere All at Once. But even as Dano is using Radcliffe’s body as a water dispenser, a hunting weapon and a fart-powered raft, a palpable tenderness emerges. They make a lovely couple.
