Gerald McMorrow’s ambitious, handsome but virtually incomprehensible film is set in both present-day London and Meanwhile City, a baroque urban sprawl of the future. It looks very good considering its small budget and begins promisingly in the future metropolis, where a shrouded man (who turns out to be Ryan Philippe) is skulking around, trying to find and kill the person who murdered a girl years before.

When the action switches to present-day London, we see a pastor (Bernard Hill) searching for his son; a jilted man (Sam Riley) pouring his heart out to his best man, and a conceptual artist (Eva Green) fighting with her mother (Susannah York) before trying to commit suicide.

As all these plotlines puzzlingly pile up, it turns out that the jilted man’s sweetheart is a teacher in Ealing and, since she is also played by Green, we begin to discover a few clues as to what the film is actually on about. But it is far too late and we are left admiring the scenery more than the opaqueness of the drama.

McMorrow is clearly an intriguing and talented British director but Franklyn is almost impossible to follow, thus wasting the talents of the good cast trying their best to make sense of it.