Misanthropic enough to make most Neil LaBute dramas look like Dumbo, Notes On A Scandal is a predatory love story based on the blackly comic novel by Zoe Heller. Playing like Single White Female for Bridge players, the film, replete with a snapping screenplay by Patrick Marber, pivots around Judi Dench’s thoroughly twisted schoolmarm. Bitter to the point of psychosis, she dismisses a Down’s Syndrome child as a ‘jester’ and her unfortunate charges at a London comprehensive as ‘proles’. This darkly amusing narrator-protagonist, a prime specimen of cutting English miserabilism, harbours covert sapphic longings for the school’s new art teacher (Blanchett). When the object of her affections conducts an affair with a 15 year-old (Northern Irish lad Simpson), the spinster plots to destroy Blanchett’s happy bourgeois home in order to possess her entirely.
Beautifully performed and completely populated by vile bodies, Notes On A Scandal is one nasty piece of work. Even the inherent implausibility of its scenario doesn’t loosen the constrictor-like hold on the viewer.