The Cold Light of Day (1996): Withnail and Si

Matty dissects a disturbing serial killer thriller and the two towering performances at the centre of it.

If you want to know what actively combatting typecasting looks like, THE COLD LIGHT OF DAY (1996) is a fine example. A creepy and unusual study of madness and obsession, this disturbing serial killer chiller — an English language retelling of Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s acclaimed Euro-thriller, It Happened in Broad Daylight (1958), and its spin-off novella, The Pledge (a text subsequently tackled by helmer Sean Penn and star Jack Nicholson in showier fashion) — is anchored by a pair of expectation subverting performances that transcend the film’s less successful elements.

The first is Richard E. Grant’s intense depiction of a brilliant yet unorthodox detective, Victor Marek. As with The Cold Light of Day’s source material, Marek becomes consumed with cracking a spate of child murders, the drama hinging on the moral quandary posed by his decision to use an unwitting single mother (Lynsey Baxter) and her eight year-old daughter (a young Perdita Weeks) as bait. Completely bereft of the whimsy and charm usually associated with Grant — particularly in the Withnail and I (1987) hero’s post COVID social media renaissance — Marek is a fascinating creature: a man motivated by good but someone as wholly unlikable and as dangerous as the prey he’s hunting…

L: Richard E. Grant as Victor Marek, R: Grant’s “brilliant yet unorthodox detective” and Simon Cadell’s “skin-crawling” serial killer face off in The Cold Light of Day‘s climax.

“Simon Cadell came from a proper theatrical background,” states author Brian Slade. “His ancestry goes back to the mid-1800s, and with his sister, Selina, and nephew, Edwin Thomas, still acting, that’s in excess of one-hundred and sixty years of acting dynasty. Obviously, Hi-de-Hi! is what Simon’s most remembered for — and The Cold Light of Day is certainly a far cry from it.”

Indeed, for those only accustomed to Simon Cadell’s work in various sitcoms and comedies — from the aforementioned Hi-de-Hi! to Blott on the Landscape and Singles — his terrifying portrayal of The Cold Light of Day’s antagonist, Vladimir Kozant — the film’s second arresting performance — is quite the shock. In It Happened in Broad Daylight, the killer was brought to life by Gert Fröbe. It was an effective turn that, according to franchise lore, led to James Bond producers, Eon, casting him as the eponymous Goldfinger (1964). However, as excellent as It Happened in Broad Daylight is, due to the manner and period of its making, you always catch Fröbe acting. In The Cold Light of Day, Cadell doesn’t so much perform as inhabit, injecting moments such as Kozant shaving his pubic hair; coddling a cache of life-size dolls; and grooming potential victims with a glove puppet with a verisimilitude that nullifies the chuckles initially prompted by their absurdity. He’s an electric, skin-crawling presence — a point Slade, Cadell’s biographer, is keen to discuss:

“One of the reasons I wrote a book about Simon is that he actually has a diverse CV, and I wanted people to see his other stuff. In the ‘70s it was mostly stage work, and he acted with people like Sir Ralph Richardson and Dame Peggy Ashcroft in his younger days — at the Bristol Old Vic, where he learned his craft, he was in the same cohort as Jeremy Irons and Tim Pigott-Smith. Simon’s most famous pre-Hi-de-hi! work was Enemy at the Door, so he had played sinister to some degree. That series, which is still around on Talking Pictures TV at the moment, was about Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands and Simon played the hideous Nazi officer Reinicke. Sounds daft to say he was evil, given the character, but he is exceptional in it.”

“With The Cold Light of Day, when I spoke to its director, Rudolf van den Berg, he said that for the killer he wanted someone that wasn’t going to be in the shadows: he wanted to see him to understand what makes him tick, and he wanted to get close to him and not just show him as Satan or whatever. Rudolf told me Simon said, ‘I’m so attracted to this part because it’s so different from anything else I’ve done. It also fills me with anxiety because I have little children too, it’s so frightening.’ Rudolf then went further and said to me, ‘Simon’s anxieties were more about his inner self. He was such a good actor you could feel it was coming from inside. There are some very frightening scenes where he’s playing with the little girl and you feel it’s coming from inside. I think that’s what worried him the most, that he had to transform into something he hated’… Ultimately, I don’t think Simon was too concerned about the audience in terms of his reputation as a popular comedy performer, he was just thinking about the challenge of playing someone so evil.”

Alas, The Cold Light of Day ranks among Cadell’s final screen projects. A heavy smoker, Cadell underwent triple heart bypass surgery in 1992 and was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1993, during his recovery. On 6th March 1996, Cadell succumbed to the disease. He was forty-five.

“Simon was given months to live, but he defied expectations and lived and worked a few more years,” says Slade. “The Cold Light of Day was shot in 1994, in and around Prague. Simon did OK through the shoot. He had ten to twelve days shooting, mostly on his own, and he and Rudolf struck up a friendship. They’d have the occasional bottle of wine together in Rudolf’s caravan after they finished shooting.”

Cadell

Released on U.S. cassette by PolyGram on 20th August 1996 and surfacing on tape in the U.K. two and a half months later, The Cold Light of Day failed to attract mainstream notice. What attention it did get was dismissive. Thankfully, the genre press was kinder. Horror bible Fangoria even nominated the film for multiple gongs at their 1997 Golden Chainsaw Awards. Grant and Cadell were toasted in the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor categories, and Baxter found herself up for Best Actress. The three were beaten by George Clooney (for From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)), Jeffrey Combs (for The Frighteners (1996)) and Neve Campbell (for Scream (1996)), respectively, while The Cold Light of Day’s contendership for Best DTV/Limited Release Film was trumped by Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man (1994).

Now, although art as competition is vulgar and futile, if you believe value rests upon the concept The Cold Light of Day’s loss to Cemetery Man is fair. Despite broadly similar fairy tale trappings and a shared feeling of dreaminess fostered by their out-of-step sense of time and place (eerie moods augmented by multinational Europudding casting), the difference in quality between Soavi’s ghoulish masterpiece and van den Berg’s flawed enterprise is black and white. Having skirted the edge of horror with the atmospheric love story Looking for Eileen (1987) before diving into it outright with De Johnsons (1992), van den Berg sports a sharp eye and alluring command of tone. Frustrating, then, that The Cold Light of Day finds the Dutch journeyman hindered by herky-jerky pacing and a script (by multi-talented photographer/political activist/journalist/screenwriter/novelist Doug Magee) riddled with bursts of dialogue that passes muster because of those reciting it.