The Limehouse Golem (2016)

A series of murders has shaken the community of Limehouse in the docklands of Victorian London. Journalists dub the murderer the Golem, after the Jewish legend. When music-hall star Elizabeth Cree is accused of poisoning her husband, John, on the same night as the last Golem murder, Inspector John Kildare discovers evidence linking John Cree to the murders and wants to solve the cases before Elizabeth is hanged.

Kildare finds a diary written by the Golem of the crimes, handwritten in a printed copy of Thomas De Quincey's essay "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts", in a collected volume in the British Museum Library Reading Room. He deduces that the Golem must be one of the four men who were in the library on the date of the last entry: Dan Leno, Karl Marx, George Gissing and John Cree. Kildare acquires handwriting samples of the other three men, while listening to Elizabeth's story about how she was the daughter of an unmarried mother and went from sewing sail-cloths at the docks to becoming a star.

When Elizabeth's abusive mother died, she was befriended by Dan Leno and fell in with his music-hall troupe, performing comic songs while dressed as a man. Her act quickly becomes second in popularity only to Leno, but she aspires to become a dramatic actor. She is wooed by John Cree, a struggling playwright. Her fellow performer, Aveline Ortega (María Valverde), becomes jealous since she herself is interested in John, and sabotages Elizabeth's first dramatic role.

Elizabeth is entrapped by the theatre's owner, a man known as 'Uncle' (Eddie Marsan) and is forced to pose nude for photographs and to beat him for his sexual gratification. She tells John, who offers to marry her and keep her safe. Elizabeth accepts and Kildare notes that Uncle died suddenly only days later, leaving the theatre to Dan Leno. John's career stalls, and he grows bitter toward Elizabeth, who supports him financially, but is only interested in what he can do for her career. She hires Aveline as a maid and facilitates an affair between Aveline and John so that she will not have to keep sleeping with him. The two remain estranged until John Cree's poisoning.

Kildare finds a handwritten copy of the play written by Cree before his death on the day Elizabeth is to be hanged. He finds it to be a match with the diary and gets an hour's postponement to her sentence, hoping that revealing John Cree's crimes will cause her sentence to be commuted. Kildare instructs her to write a statement, but she writes the confession "I am the Golem", her handwriting matching the diary. Kildare realises that she is the true Golem rather than her husband. She killed 'Uncle' and began committing murders as the Golem to make a lasting name for herself, poisoning her husband when he found evidence.

Broken at this revelation, Kildare destroys Elizabeth's confession and allows her to be hanged for the murder of her husband, robbing her of the fame of being the Golem, allowing the solution that John Cree was the Golem to stand, for which Kildare is acclaimed, and granting Elizabeth the fame of having eliminated the Golem rather than the greater fame of being the Golem, which she actually desired. In the final scene, Dan Leno's troupe perform John's play, rewritten to tell Elizabeth's life story. Aveline, playing Elizabeth, dies during the hanging scene because the safety mechanism is not in place. Leno dresses as Elizabeth to continue the play. He takes a bow, and looks knowingly at Kildare in the audience. Then we no longer see Leno but Elizabeth herself on the stage.