London Premiere / Best UK Feature Nominee

*Chance to win an Epiphone John Lennon signature acoustic guitar at the screening

Synopsis

A dramatisation of Mark Chapman's plan to murder John Lennon.

Review

Newcomer Jonas Ball stars as the mentally disturbed obsessive responsible for the murder that shocked the world and ended an era on December 8th 1980. Using only Chapman’s on-the-record testimonies and entries from his journal, Writer / Director Andrew Piddington recreates Chapman’s deranged plot to assassinate the most famous man in the world.

In this exhibition into the mind of a killer, Piddington reveals Chapman as a man living an average and dull life. A crap day job and disconnected relationships with everyone around him including his wife and mother, send Chapman searching for some deeper meaning to his existence. While browsing through his local library, he comes across J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and immediately forms an unhealthy obsession with the book’s central character, Holden Caulfield and his scorn for “phoneys”. Falling upon a picture book of John Lennon, Chapman starts to view him as the world’s biggest phoney and travels thousands of miles to New York City, where his deluded fantasy becomes reality.

Brilliantly shot with an intense mix of drama and historical facts, Piddington’s choice to make a whole film recreating John Lennon’s murder gives us an insight into the mind of the most famous of all celebrity killers and puts a unique spin on the darkest element of the Lennon saga. Chilling and at times very disturbing, this film is not to be missed.

Jesse Vile