After five seasons of gritty crime drama where Idris Elba’s brooding detective character John Luther apprehended criminals and experienced the death of his loved ones, Jamie Payne brings the detective to the big screen in Netflix’s “Luther: The Fallen Sun.” This 2023 movie sees Luther being shoved behind bars when his past crimes surface while trying to bring down the diabolical serial killer David Robey (Andy Serkis). At almost 120 minutes long, the movie focuses on Luther relying on every bit of his detective prowess to apprehend the gruesome Robey before he unleashes his true plan. We get to see first-hand the conditions this morally gray man goes through, and the nuances of his character come to light while he serves as a vigilante but with a heart.
It might be difficult at first to get an understanding of John Luther if you aren’t familiar with the five seasons in which he plays the titular character. He pulls out all the stops in his pursuit of truth and manipulates his brain to think as a criminal to apprehend a criminal, alienating him from his wife. By the time “The Fallen Sun” kicks off, he’s a tired man, devoid of the wife or the lover—the psychopathic Alice Morgan—and on his way to apprehend a freak who’s more twisted than one’s worst nightmares. After five seasons of suffering from having people die around him, Luther promises a mother called Corrinne that he’s going to find her son Callum, who’s gone missing. However, he fails to apprehend the killer or bring back Callum because his past crimes surface, and he’s shoved inside the prison. When the monstrous murderer named David Robey makes Luther listen to the blood-curdling screams of Callum while he is tortured, the former DCI clenches his jaw and becomes determined to nab this sick evil incarnate and is ready to go to any length to make it happen.Â
Luther agrees to be on the receiving end of a world of danger as a prison riot happens, and the entire prison cracks down on him as the policeman inmate. He makes his way out of the prison and manages to triangulate the location from which the radio frequency of 65.8 Hz loaded with Callum’s screams reached him, but when he has a tattoo needle aimed at the suspect’s eyeballs, he can’t go ahead with his plan—blinding him with the needle. The suspect named Derek—a tattoo artist from whose parlor the frequency reached Luther—is helpless against this man who’s seeing red, but Luther can’t hurt him. That’s because he has a condition: when he looks into people’s eyes, he can tell if they’re truly good or bad, and Derek, as Luther could see, was a good man. He can break someone’s face with a single punch if he decides they’re guilty, but he doesn’t hurt a person if he decides they’re good people. It’s not just because of this ability to understand if someone’s guilty or not; he also has another characteristic that’s rather lacking in today’s world: empathy. When a young officer named Jamal is bleeding out because the primary suspect, Robey, slit his femoral artery, Luther, whom Jamal had hit, starts tying a tourniquet on his leg while maintaining conversation to keep him awake. Sure, the former DCI is driven by vengeance to get his hands on the psychopath that’s wreaking havoc in London as well as the rest of Europe, but he won’t let an innocent man bleed out for that.
As a detective, Luther was always brilliant, and his gift was the curse that took everyone he loved from him. However, he was able to use this curse to deduce that Robey targeted people who had secrets to hide and made them do unimaginable things because they were afraid of shame. No other detective, including DSU Martin Schenk and DCI Odette Raine, could’ve understood this link that connected every victim of the monster, but it’s the vigilante ex-DCI’s deduction that narrows the list down. While meeting Callum’s mother, Luther lets his empathic side show and very gently lets Corrinne in on the news that she has been befriended by the very man who tortured her son before murdering him. It seems that anyone who hadn’t watched the previous five seasons of the BBC special would never know that this is the same man who was jailed on accusations of manslaughter.
Finally, though, the characteristic that helps Luther bring down Robey is his ability to get into the heads of the diabolical monsters by looking into their eyes. Upon staring into the manic and dilated eyes of David Robey, he realizes just what he needs to do to destroy the confidence that has kept Robey’s maniacal chest inflated. Using the information from his wife, Georgette, Luther breaks Robey down by saying the psychopath is an anxious and pathetic vermin that hides his weakness behind the blood he sheds. He purposefully lets Robey learn that his wife is alive and how Luther had cringed inside when the psychopath had offered him a mint at a bus stop in the past. As for the voyeuristic freaks who were watching live murder in the Red Room, his threat that their IP address is being tracked is enough for them to flee immediately. In the end, though, even while drowning in icy cold waters, Luther ensures to open the doors remotely from Robey’s phone to make sure Odette and her daughter Anya can escape, even though the mother had been against him right from the start.
The movie leaves behind a lot of questions for the future, sure, but as a standalone, it’s a detailed look into the characteristics of a man who will not kill because it’s against his principles, but he’ll seek vengeance and make the criminal face justice. Luther kills no one directly in “The Fallen Sun,” but he saves several prisoners whom Robey had held captive in the prison cells. A good man in heart who got dealt a bad hand at life manages to find redemption in the end when Corrinne watches the news about Luther bringing an end to David Robey — even though he didn’t kill him — and weeps, probably forgiving him for all the unkind words she had hurled at him before.
