Set in the interrogation room of a fictional Louisiana Police Station, two local detectives question different suspects to get to the bottom of a number of different Homicides. Here is Screen Critix Review of Tales from The Murder Room.
There are so many police procedurals on TV and in film nowadays that to stand out from the crowd you need to do something a little different. The film-making partnership of brothers King Jeff and Gorio have tried to do just that with Tales From The Murder Room. Initially, a TV anthology show that streamed on Amazon Prime, Tales From The Murder Room chronicles the activities inside one specific Louisiana police interrogation room as Homicide Detectives listen to tales told by suspects, witnesses, and other individuals relating to various murder cases.
Each case has its own twists, turns, and merits, while also introducing us to many diverse characters who may or may not have committed murder. These scenes have been edited together from different episodes of the TV show, so each interrogation is a self-contained tale of differing length. However, to freshen up the footage, Jeff and Gorio have written and directed some more scenes to connect each chapter with a through-line. Each case now comes from the pages of a book that one of the characters in the new scenes is reading, while also helping to pad out the run time to a feature-length 97 minutes.
The original show was filmed in stylish black and white with each episode running between 8 to 20 minutes long, the interrogations remain in this form cut exactly from the series, while the new footage is filmed in colour. This helps in a couple of ways, firstly it allows us to differentiate between the old and new footage while also enabling us to automatically assume that the black and white footage is flashbacks. In the notes, the director mentions that he wanted this colour shift to suggest the black and white nature of the pages in the book, and on that level it also works.
The older scenes work better and are far more stylish than the newer additions, there are some Dutch angles in use, as well as shaky cam to ramp up the tension, and there is also the classic trope of medium shots and close-ups of photographs on a whiteboard with our detectives trying to connect the dots and solve each element of the case. There are also a lot of darkly lit moments that emphasise the noir roots of the crime drama. The newer scenes seem very cartoony in comparison to these and because they don’t have the edge of the TV show they do look like they were tacked on.
That said, the acting from our main protagonists is very good; both King Jeff as Detective Jerry July and Gorio as Lt George Rook are excellent anchors for the film. Jeff particularly has a lot of charisma but it is Gorio as Rook who stands out, his gruff world-weariness is effortless. These detectives would not look out of place in an episode of The Wire.
Although there are a few sound and continuity issues and the new footage can become a little distracting it doesn’t stop the main content of the film from holding your interest. Tales from The Murder Room is an enjoyable police procedural that at its heart contains two very strong central performances.
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