REVIEW: 'Margin Call'

Boardroom thriller following the employees of a large New York investment bank over the opening 24 hours of the 2008 financial crisis. All-star cast includes Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Paul Bettany. Click here for movie times.

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The title of writer-director JC Chandor’s dizzying debut refers to the moment when all debts must be repaid – the day of reckoning. And boy does he deliver. At an unnamed Wall Street firm (Lehman Brothers!), recently fired risk manager Stanley Tucci gives young buck Zachary Quinto (Spock in Star Trek) a file that will, ultimately, start the 2007 recession. So begins a financial forest fire that, over the course of one long, over-caffeinated night, engulfs the entire company and – as we now know – world.

Part of Chandor’s genius (or extreme good fortune) is that each new level of the corporation is overseen by a brilliant actor who’s correspondingly higher up the Hollywood pecking order than the last. So Quinto reports to Paul Bettany, who reports to Kevin Spacey, who reports to Jeremy Irons, each more compromised – or corrupt – than their inferiors. “You and I can’t control it, or stop it, even slow it,” says Irons urbanely as he sells a million futures down the river with a lupine smile. “We just react. And we make a lot of money if we get it right.”

It’s a brutal world (“Still alive?” the execs keep asking each other), brilliantly evoked by one of the most impressive casts assembled in recent memory (Simon 'The Mentalist' Baker is particularly chilling). But this is Chandor’s triumph, and marks him out as someone to keep an eye on in the future. Let’s hope he’s never handed such an all-pervading human horror story again.

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