Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rogue Agent’ on Hulu, in Which James Norton Keenly Plays a Skeezy Real-Life Con Artist

Rogue Agent (now on Hulu) is the fictionalized story of real-life almost-human-being Robert Hendy-Freegard, a skilled scamster who manipulated people into believing that he was an MI5 secret agent. So what we have here is a BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie straight out of the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction file, starring James Norton (Little Women, Things Heard and Seen) as the serial conman and Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace, Prince of Persia) as his lover, a lawyer who might just be on to his schemes. Sound like a potentially fascinating yarn? I’ll be the judge of that.

ROGUE AGENT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with some title cards explaining how, in the 1990s, British intelligence service MI5 used freelance agents to keep tabs on Irish Republican Army members plotting bombings, and you brace yourself for some complicated spy shit. But I’m here to tell you that these title cards contain more information than you need, and merely set the stage for the story of a sociopath who pretended to be an MI5 agent so he could gaslight, torture and scam people. Why? For kicks, maybe? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s 1993, and Robert Freegard (Norton) is a beguilingly handsome gent in the marvelously named burg of Shropshire, working as a bartender, although he tells three college students it’s just a cover for his spy gig, which happens to be rooting out IRA members who are attending their school. They’re reluctant, but he persuades them to help him save the lives of “men, women and children.” A few months go by, and then he drops a bomb on them: They’ve been compromised. The IRA is going to kill them if they don’t abandon their lives and leave everything behind right now. And off they go.

Subtitle: NINE YEARS LATER. Meet Alice (Gemma Arterton), a single, well-to-do lawyer who walks by a luxury-car dealership every day. One of the salesmen there? Robert Hansen is his name, although we know what Alice doesn’t know, namely, that that probably isn’t his name. He asks her out, she dodges, he parries, she agrees, he stands her up, she’s pissed, he shows up at her door and says his dad was rushed to the hospital and that’s why he missed their date. Bullshit detector: Blaring. But good people like to give others the benefit of the doubt, so she believes him and they do what incredibly attractive people in movies do, namely, eat dinner, make out, remove each other’s clothes and make a mess of the sheets. Meanwhile, the film cuts away here and there to one of the aforementioned college students, Sophie (Marisa Abela), who works cleaning a motel and looks a little worse for wear, and occasionally meets with Robert to discuss spy things.

Something compels Alice to ask a private investigator to look into her new beau, and he confirms that Robert Hansen doesn’t exist. Hmm. Alice tells Robert what she did, and uses her job as a litigation solicitor, which sounds like a very important job, as an excuse. And this is when he tells her everything is cover for his top-secret gig with MI5, and Alice, being good people, I think believes him, since they soon zoom off in a borrowed Ferrari for a weekend away, with ‘Just Like Heaven’ playing on the soundtrack. They lie in bed and talk about their dreams, and come up with a plan to start their own luxury car-leasing business, since she has all that litigation solicitor cash sitting around. However, thank Frank, pagan god of side-eyed suspiciousness, that Alice can’t quite stop pulling at the loose thread of truth, perhaps because she senses that Robert is trying to take some Ajax and a scrub brush to her brain.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Catch Me If You Can is right up there, and maybe I Love You Phillip Morris, with a couple of upsetting scenes that brought to mind harrowing 2015 drama Room.

Performance Worth Watching: Norton delivers an admirably multifaceted portrayal of a man with a thick veneer of confidence atop what we can only imagine is a deeply buried sense of desperation stemming from a twisted and grotesque backstory.

Memorable Dialogue: Opening voiceover: “There’s a trick that spies use: If you want to make an instant connection with someone, look into their eyes just long enough to register their eye color. He said it works every time.”

Sex and Skin: Brief man-butt; a decidedly not-sexy, non-nude sex scene.

Our Take: Rogue Agent is a solid outing that goes about two-thirds-deep into the psychology of manipulators and manipulatees. Any deeper, and you’d have a memorably involving film. Any shallower, and you’d have exploitation. As it stands, it’s a consistently compelling drama that gives Norton and Arterton a few relatively juicy opportunities to parlay as a grossly duplicitous charmer and a woman who’s learning how to be duplicitous right back. 

Beyond that, the film is content to play it safe – it only grazes the surface of its antagonist’s sexual depravities – and dutifully navigate from its intriguing opening hook to a conclusion that’s reasonably satisfying despite showing some of the seams of fictional adaptation. Even if you don’t know all the ins and outs of Hendy-Freegard’s true story, you sense some significant narrative simplification and condensation occurring, which fractures the suspension of disbelief somewhat. I guess if you want the real thing, watch Netflix series The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman, a three-parter that might prompt some deeper questions about the nature of compulsive liars. Rogue Agent ain’t bad, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg, and sometimes feels like it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sure, there’s surely more there to be had there, but Rogue Agent is a thoroughly watchable thriller with a compelling performance from Norton.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.