In the Stephen Graham-powered real-time 2021 drama Boiling Point, director Philip Barantini showed us that there are few things quite as nerve-shredding as a misplaced walnut dressing and a nut allergy. Now Barantini has traded the cacophony of the kitchen for the kind of tension-heavy drama where the creak of a floorboard will give you away. Accused is a different kind of home-invasion thriller, though: the invasion starts not with an axe through the door, but the gentle buzz of a phone notification.
Sex Education’s Chaneil Kular is cocky young Harri Bhavsar, headed to his parents’ gigantic country home somewhere in the Yorkshire countryside to look after the family dog while they’re away on holiday. But just as he’s walking through the train station, his life switches tracks. First, he spots some who looks exactly like him, hiding under a cap and hoodie just like his, going the other way on an escalator. Then, as his train pulls away from London, phone notifications inform Harri — and his fellow passengers — about a terror attack at the station they just left.
As shock turns to anger, the police release an image of their suspect: Harri’s doppelgänger. Faceless, nameless social-media users and forum-dwellers start to do their thing — “CSI Twitter,” as one puts it — and an off-hand tweet from an old classmate points the internet in Harri’s direction. Suddenly his friends won’t take his calls, his girlfriend Chloe (Lauryn Ajufo) decides she won’t be coming down to meet him at Bhavsar Towers, and the only advice from the police is to tough it out. Soon racist anger is spilling over into the real world, and Harri finds himself on his own, as the internet congratulates itself on its amateur detective skills; in the darker recesses of the web, racist vigilantes want Harri dead.
Making social media look cinematic is tricky, but Philip Barantini’s adroit cranking up of the tension makes it sing.
It’s all very smartly drawn, particularly a sequence in which Harri slowly realises what’s going on while double-screening Twitter and a Frankenstein flick. Making social media look cinematic is tricky, but Barantini’s adroit cranking up of the tension as we flick from screen to screen while an oblivious Harri becomes Britain’s most hated man — plus Kular’s mounting disbelief and frustration — make it sing. (As an aside: some of the radio presenters in Accused would, you’d hope, be getting a shoeing from Ofcom.) Kular is on his own for huge chunks of Accused — ably supported by his Golden Retriever, Flynn — and carries all Harri’s impotent terror and desperation with an everyman plausibility.
The second half switches gears into more straightforward, splattery, home-invasion thriller territory, and loses some of its flavour in the process. However, an extended near-silent cat-and-mouse chase around the dark mansion is particularly tense as Barantini’s camera bobs and weaves around corners and peers into the darkness. Though the denouement is a touch undercooked, it carries a smart little coda to the racist anger which started the hunt for Harri in the first place. Harri might be the accused of the title, but the movie points its finger at anyone too keen to have fun playing detective to let facts get in the way of their prejudices.
Accused just about manages to keep itself together as things go south for Harri, and it’s a movie built on a potentially star-making performance from Kular. It’s at its best, though, when it leans into the dread rather than going big; when it’s simmering away nicely, rather than hitting boiling point.