Andrew Piddington’s clever reconstruction of The Killing of John Lennon took four years to assemble and earned him a lucrative contract with Miramax. Instead of making a documentary, Piddington paints a surreal picture of this famous murder as if he was a bystander in Mark Chapman’s head. This is not a healthy place to be, but there’s a hypnotic beauty about the way the director shoots the story through Chapman’s eyes.

The film begins with a day in the life of the 25-year-old Chapman (Jonas Ball), a security guard in Honolulu. Chapman has a Japanese wife, Gloria (Mie Omori), at whom he shrieks; a mother (Krisha Fairch-ild) who dates men younger than himself; and grudges about his father that bubble in and out of focus like the grainy news items we glimpse on the television screens at Chapman’s home, or in his New York hotel rooms.

Ball is utterly mesmerising as the unstable Chapman, so creepily in tune with his thoughts he looks unhealthy. The would-be killer is dangerously self-obsessed by the fact that he is not a particularly interesting person, until he gets hold of a library copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The book illuminates and magnifies a confusion as adolescent as it is anguished. For entire reels the intoxicated Chapman actually believes he is Holden Caulfield. He strokes Salinger’s image on the front cover of Time magazine, and stands for days outside Lennon’s apartment on West 72nd Street home in the Dakota with a big furry hat on his head and Lennon’s double album Double Fantasy under his arm.

The events leading up to the murder – and the reconstruction of the moment itself – are supremely well-handled by Piddington. Why did he plant five bullets in John Lennon? “Because he’s a phoney,” says Chapman, clearly not at all sure why he killed Lennon at all. “I just want to go back to how it was before I pulled the trigger,” he says in the back of the police car.

How psychiatrists, the police, prisoners and the public react to Chapman after the shooting is equally revealing. He is caught in the eye of a storm. The power of the film is the way it charts, indeed enacts, a man losing his grip on reality. An extraordinary debut by Piddington.

Certificate 15, 114mins

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