Doctor Jekyll

The resurrection that arrived by post

Get the chronology straight, because the marketing didn’t. Doctor Jekyll was announced in February 2022 as an independent production from B-Good Picture Company, and it was in the can by March — cast completed, photography wrapped, all before the word “Gore” meant anything to anyone at Hammer. That same March, Hammer Studios — the company as it then was, under its previous ownership — acquired the UK distribution rights. A pickup. A film already in the works, boarded by a famous name that had developed none of it.

Then, on 31 August 2023, the John Gore Organisation’s acquisition of Hammer was announced, and the announcement itself billed Doctor Jekyll as the first film of the new incarnation to be released. Hammer’s own release publicity settled on the precise, printable version of the claim: “the first release for the recently resurrected Hammer, following its acquisition by John Gore.” First release. Hold onto that word, because it is the whole truth of the matter — Gore is among the film’s credited executive producers, consistent with the new company helping it to completion, but nobody at the new Hammer originated, developed or shot a frame of it. Gore, to be fair, framed his own claim as a matter of fitness rather than authorship: “It is very appropriate that Joe Stephenson’s thrilling new film should be the first of a new generation of Hammer movies.” A new generation, launched with a film the generation inherited. There are worse omens. There are also more honest posters.

Not Henry in a dress

Now the other thing everyone gets wrong. Nina Jekyll is not Henry Jekyll with the sexes flipped, and this is not a remake wearing a twist. Nina is Henry’s granddaughter — his descendant, who has inherited his mansion and his condition both. Henry himself is in the film, in flashback, played by Jonathan Hyde — yes, an actor named Hyde playing Jekyll; the casting department earned its lunch that day. The structure is a legacy sequel: the old sin, passed down the bloodline like the house and the money.

And the casting was open. Izzard, in her own words: “It was open gender casting that we did… a trans character does not impinge upon the story, I just happened to be trans.” Nina is a trans woman; the film states it and moves on, which is exactly the temperature Izzard wanted — she called it “fantastic,” as a trans woman, to play a trans character, while stressing the story is not about transition. Stephenson has been just as blunt about the other lazy reading, the one where Hyde is a metaphor for it: the film’s themes, he insists, “are true to the original work.” What the film can claim, through Stephenson, is a genuine first: “There’ve been over 100 cinematic adaptations of Stevenson’s novella, but there has never been a trans Dr. Jekyll.” The alter ego, by the way, is Rachel Hyde. Edward belongs to the novella and the old films. This house has a new tenant.

The carer and the house

Dr Nina Jekyll built a fortune in pharmaceuticals and became a household name; scandal pushed her out of the spotlight and into seclusion in a large, isolated country mansion, where she is recovering from a broken leg, walks with a cane, and keeps to a strict schedule of medication. She needs a live-in carer. Enter Rob — played by Scott Chambers, and hold on for the name, because the film is not subtle and does not want to be: Rob Stevenson. Robert Louis Stevenson, in full. The author of the novella, reincarnated as an ex-convict applying for a job in his own story.

Rob is fresh out of prison, a former thief and recovering addict staying with his older brother Ewan. His baby daughter was born while he was inside; he has never met her, she is seriously ill and in social care, and a job — any job, even this one — is his route to her. Ewan gets him the interview. The estate manager, Sandra Poole (Lindsay Duncan), is scandalised that such an unqualified candidate was even considered and cannot work out how his application got through. Nina takes to him anyway, and gives him the trial. Among his duties: keeping Nina on her medication.

They bond, genuinely. But something is wrong in the house. Nina’s behaviour swings without warning. Sandra disappears, in circumstances nobody will explain. And then Rob’s past arrives at the gates: his ex, Maeve — mother of his daughter — blackmails him to let her crew rob the mansion, or lose access to the girl forever. He refuses. Maeve and a masked partner break in anyway, and the confrontation turns bloody. Underneath it all, the truth Rob has been too grateful to look at: Rachel Hyde has been dealing with him without his knowledge, and Hyde has a proposition — wealth and power, with a catch. A late twist reframes how Rob came to be at the mansion at all. He has been manipulated from the start. And Nina, desperate to be rid of Hyde, asks the one favour that tells you she means it: help her end her own life, so the other woman dies with her. The censor’s notes confirm the film earns its 15 the hard way — a shooting in the head with bloody detail, throats slashed, a transformation that leaves its subject looking like a decaying corpse, and cigarettes laced with a fantastical drug. This is not a cosy film.

A sequel to a film that was never made

Stephenson knew exactly what he was holding: the most familiar story in horror, filmed over a hundred times. His stated approach, in his own words: “With a story so familiar to so many people there’s no need to be religiously faithful — the challenge here was how to make it feel fresh and yet still true to the themes of the original work. Stevenson’s work becomes a storytelling toolbox.” And on the film’s odd, haunted shape: it plays, he says, “like a sequel to a version of Jekyll and Hyde that was never made.” That is the truest sentence anyone has written about it. The film behaves as if you already know Henry’s story — because culturally, you do — and spends its time on the granddaughter living in the wreckage.

The old Hammer had been here twice before: The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll in 1960 and Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde in 1971, which makes this the studio’s third screen Jekyll across sixty-three years. Dan Kelly-Mulhern’s script — his screenwriting debut — turns its debts into jokes and echoes. Rob is named for the author. And Jekyll’s household manager is a Poole, which was the name of Henry’s butler in the novella; read that as the echo it appears to be, because the film never underlines it. Stephenson and Chambers, incidentally, arrived together: both came from Chicken (2015), Stephenson’s earlier feature, and the ease between director and leading man shows in every two-handed scene in that house.

Two premieres and a recut

The world premiere was FrightFest in London, on 25 August 2023 — six days before the Gore acquisition was even announced, which tells you how much of this “launch of the new era” was assembled in retrospect. And what FrightFest saw was an initial cut, not the finished film. The release version added an opening newspaper headline identifying Nina as trans, which the festival audience never saw; write about the finished film, because the festival crowd saw a draft of it. The red-carpet premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square on 11 October 2023 was a gala, not a world premiere, whatever some of the coverage loosely called it — and no, the film did not premiere at the BFI London Film Festival; that claim circulates, and it is simply wrong.

The UK theatrical release followed on 27 October 2023, exclusively in cinemas, through Hammer — on 65 screens, which tells its own story about the scale of this resurrection. America waited until 2 August 2024, when Hammer distributed its own film in select theatres and on VOD. The money, such as can honestly be printed: no budget figure has ever been published — Stephenson calls it, in his own words, “a very low-budget movie,” and that is as precise as the record gets — and Box Office Mojo’s UK chart records a UK total of $8,004 from those 65 screens. A worldwide figure of $21,524 circulates, but it conflicts with Box Office Mojo’s own chart, so this page prints the UK figure, attributed, and no other. Anyone who gives you a settled worldwide gross for this film is tidier than the evidence.

What the critics made of it

The pattern set in early and never moved: Izzard praised in nearly every notice, including the hostile ones; the pacing and the script faulted in nearly all of them, including the kind ones. The Rotten Tomatoes critics’ consensus calls it “a meandering reinterpretation whose gothic ambitions can’t overcome its hollow storytelling and awkward tonal choices.” Todd Gilchrist, reviewing for Variety, found it “meandering and empty, an update with neither enough loyalty to its source material or imagination to make its departures meaningful” — while conceding Stephenson had found “a more-than-game collaborator in Izzard.” Peter Bradshaw called it “bafflingly laborious, leaden and self-conscious.” Kim Newman, cooler but fairer, judged that it “could do with more primal rampage to go with its sense of creeping coercion. Nevertheless, Izzard is great value.”

The warm end exists, and it is warm. Lillian Crawford wrote that this is “the sort of horror that has you laughing one minute and throwing your popcorn in the air in fright the next… It looks like Hammer has returned from the dead.” Clint Worthington allowed that “for as much as Doctor Jekyll rides high on its compelling central performance, the film that surrounds that star turn can’t quite hide (or Hyde?) its weightlessness.” William Bibbiani called it “an excellent showcase of Izzard’s wonderful talents,” and Mae Trumata greeted it as “an enthusiastic welcome into the new era of Hammer Films and an exciting precedent for its future.” On Rotten Tomatoes the film stands at 41% from 34 reviews, as checked on 25 October 2026 — a figure that has drifted before and will again, so it is printed here with its date on it, and with no audience score, because none could be verified.

The first face of the new Hammer

So what is it, finally? A small film carrying an enormous name. The new Hammer needed a first step and this — an independent, low-budget, one-house Gothic melodrama it hadn’t even made — is the step it got, and there is something weirdly fitting in that: Hammer began, back in the day, by picking up other people’s pictures too. What matters is what’s on the screen, and what’s on the screen is Eddie Izzard, in a tartan skirt in a lamplit hall, playing a woman at war with the worst of herself while a young man with everything to lose decides how much of his soul the rent on a life costs. It is slow where it should smoulder and it talks when it should pounce. But as the first release of a resurrected studio — the granddaughter’s inheritance, spent carefully — it earns its place in the line. The name is back. This is the face it came back wearing.