Luther: The Fallen Sun · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the coat. A rumpled tweed overcoat moving through sodium-lit rain, a big man carrying it like weather he has chosen to live inside. John Luther doesn't wear it so much as inhabit it, and the film knows this — it dresses him in it the way an opera dresses a tenor, because the coat says everything before he does: a man out of step with the institutions around him, outside them, absorbing the city's wet misery into his own body. That coat is what Deleuze would call a gest — not a costume but a posture, an attitude held until it exposes a whole social relation. Luther is the law that the law expelled, and he carries that contradiction in his shoulders.

Here is the surprising thing, and the reason Deleuze is worth bringing to a glossy 2023 Netflix manhunt at all. Almost everything in The Fallen Sun runs on what Deleuze calls the movement-image at full power — the old sensory-motor circuit where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and action resolves the situation. Luther sees that London is being terrorized; Luther breaks out of prison and goes to fix it with his hands. That is the action-image in its large form: a global situation (a city under a killer's campaign) presses and presses until a decisive act transforms it. Deleuze took the large form from John Ford and the Western, the encompassing milieu that calls a man to act. The Fallen Sun is a London Western. The city is the synsign, the encompasser — rendered as a single hostile, beautiful organism, sodium and shadow and rain — and it summons its lawman.

And the structure is a pure binomial, force against force: Luther versus David Robey, hero versus villain, the duel the film inherits openly from Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs — the theatrical killer known to us early, locked in something intimate with the haunted man hunting him. There's no mystery to solve, really. The dossier is right that the interest lies less in the puzzle than in the spectacle of two forces pulled toward collision. That's the action-image admitting what it always was: not detection but combat.

So why does the film still feel modern, even queasy? Because Robey doesn't belong to the same regime Luther does. Luther is a man of the sensory-motor world — he perceives, he acts, action discharges into the situation and changes it. Robey is something else: a predator of the network, harvesting people's private shames and intimate images, extorting and orchestrating strangers toward ruin from a distance. That's the impulse-image wearing a modern mask — Deleuze's world of naked drives erupting beneath the social surface, appetite and degradation organized as a line of slope toward death. Robey's secrets-and-blackmail machine is a great fetish-engine, the part-object (your shame, your photo) charged with compulsive force. And his fortress lair, the snowbound place the narrative finally retreats into, is a textbook originary world — the savage milieu revealed beneath the derived, surveilled city, the cruel ground that the social surface was only ever hiding.

His weapon, though, is the relation-image: meaning built from relations, the web of who-knows-what-about-whom that networked life imposes on everyone. Robey weaponizes the mark — the object meaningful by its customary chain, the thing that, once seen, makes you expect what comes next — and turns everyone's data into a leash. The series always staged its crimes as tableaux to be decoded, killers as macabre artists; the film amplifies that into murder-as-public-performance, scenes arranged to be read. This is the deep formal joke Deleuze lets us name: Robey fights with the dispersed, relational, post-action logic of the surveillance world, and Luther answers him with a fist and a coat. The villain is from 2023. The hero is from 1931.

Which brings the lineage home. The film descends straight from Fritz Lang's M — the citywide hunt for a compulsive killer, the murderer marked and pursued through the metropolis rather than withheld for a reveal, the whole thing carved in expressionist chiaroscuro where light and shadow carry a non-organic life of their own. Larry Smith, who lit Eyes Wide Shut, brings Kubrick's practical sodium-and-tungsten nocturne directly into Luther's amber-against-black London; Se7en and Manhunter sit in between, handing down the rain-slick city of perpetual dread and the cool architectural color of the profiler's duel. The Long Good Friday gave the franchise its debt to London as a real working place, not a backdrop. Luther is a chapter in that long noir argument about whether one moral body can still act against a city.

That's the significance, and it's worth saying plainly because the film is easy to dismiss as franchise spectacle. In a moment when so much cinema has gone over to dispersed, networked, relational images — to villains who are really systems — The Fallen Sun makes a stubborn case for the old action-image: the belief that a person can still perceive a wrong and walk into the dark and change it. Deleuze charted the crisis that broke that faith. Luther, in his terrible coat, is what the faith looks like when it refuses to break. Watch it again for that refusal — and for the coat.