Film Review : Control

I was never a huge fan of Joy Division although Love Will Tear Us Apart was clearly a thing of rare power and beauty, so I'm not going to claim to be one of the several millions who seemed to attend their gigs but who can't be clearly accounted for by a review of their gigging schedule during their relatively brief existence.

However, that didn't stop me going to see Control at the cinema as the story of Ian Curtis life and death is clearly one that has helped to cement the legendary status that the band now hold. I'm very glad I did as it's an excellent movie and one of those rare films that inhabits your thought processes for hours after the credits have rolled.

The casting was excellent (with perhaps the one exception being Tony Wilson) and it gave a real sense of Curtis as an already insecure but talented individual backed into a corner by the troika of growing success, a failing marriage that he needs to continue to cling to and the ongoing impact of his epilepsy.

There's one scene in particular which seemed to sum up his life in many way when he is confronted by his wife Debbie (played by Samantha Morton) where he backs off and continues to back off until he ends up in the corner of the room with nowhere else to go. It doesn't take much to imagine that was how he felt the morning that he decided to take his own life.

Impressively, the actors who played Joy Division actually performed the music themselves and it came across very well indeed. Sam Riley himself was a revelation as Curtis and he made the character live (if that's not a somewhat inappropriate description but I hope you see what I mean).

All in all, the experience was sufficient to encourage me to reinvestigate the Joy Division back catalogue (recently reissued in the remastered and expanded form) and to purchase Deborah Curtis' book on which the film was based.