A film about the last hangman in England is a dour subject, and this one is quite straightforward. It questions the viewer through simple symbolics and metaphors and doesn’t demand much. Timothy Spall acts very well in a straight-jacketed style. All in all this is a quite broken film, as if the screen-play was made using a lot of seemingly good ideas, but together they make for a fragmented film. Good direction, yet flawed as a whole.