Synopsis- In flooded, near-future London, a traumatised detective pursues a terrifying, seemingly non-human killer, uncovering a conspiracy of fear, violence, and environmental collapse in a city on the brink.
Director- Tony Maylam (with uncredited work by Ian Sharp)
Cast- Rutger Hauer, Kim Cattrall, Neil Duncan, Alastair Duncan, Michael J. Pollard
Genre- Science Fiction, Action, Horror, Thriller
Released- 1992
There’s a particular pleasure in watching a film so defiantly strange, so unapologetically grubby, that it feels like it crawled out of the cinematic sewers and demanded your attention. Split Second, is one such film, and makes me so happy discovering in in the sale section of HMV. This dystopian sci-fi horror-thriller starring the ever-magnetic Rutger Hauer: a grimy, delirious genre mash-up that should fall apart at the seams but instead swaggers through its chaos with an irresistible, waterlogged charm.
Set in a future London drowning both literally and metaphorically, its streets flooded by climate catastrophe, its institutions sinking under apathy, the film introduces Hauer as Harley Stone, a hard-bitten detective whose methods are as soaked in caffeine as they are in trauma (An 80s sci-fi with 90s action). Hauer plays Stone with characteristic intensity: a twitchy, sleepless bundle of nerves wrapped in black leather and existential dread. It’s the kind of performance that reminds you why Hauer became a cult icon; he can turn a half-baked line into something fatalistic simply by growling it.
Stone’s quarry is a monstrous serial killer who behaves with decidedly non-human flair, leaving behind cryptic symbols and a trail of eviscerated bodies. Enter Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan), an overeager rookie psychologist whose bookish enthusiasm provides both comic relief and, occasionally, genuine insight. Their odd-couple partnership forms the film’s messy, beating heart, one fuelled by jittery banter, escalating firepower, and the sense that both men are clinging to rationality by their fingernails.
Kim Cattrall appears as Michelle, Stone’s former lover, grounding the film’s more frantic impulses with a welcome dose of human warmth. Yet warmth is hardly Split Second’s priority. What it truly revels in is atmosphere: the filthy, neon-splashed, perpetually rain-drenched aesthetic that owes as much to Blade Runner as to early-’90s British grunge. London becomes a character in its own right, a mouldy labyrinth of tunnels, nightclubs, and squalid flats that feel one power cut away from total collapse (not too far from the truth in some areas).
I really might admire the film’s grimy exuberance, its willingness to lean into pulp and make a spectacle of its own excess. There’s a certain liberation in how Split Second embraces both its budgetary constraints and its maximalist ambitions. The creature design remains shrouded in shadows, budget or intention, who can say?, but this restraint builds tension, allowing the film’s most lurid ideas to fester in the mind rather than flash on the screen.
Is it coherent? Not especially. Does it matter? Absolutely not. The film’s tangled plotting, eccentric character dynamics, and gleefully over-the-top gunfights form a patchwork that’s far more enthralling than it has any right to be. Split Second is scrappy, silly, atmospheric, and weirdly endearing: a soggy little gem from the era of practical splatter and smoky neon noir. Imperfect, yes, but irresistibly so.
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