Lori Butler doesn’t feel that there is anything shameful about copying valuable paintings on demand and selling them to rich people to make a living. Her victims swindle the tax authorities; she swindles them. The details of the con vary. Sometimes the buyer has only ever seen the work online. They have never experienced the aura of the authentic—let alone register that they own a fake. Maybe the middle-man takes a cut. In any event it is taken for granted that they won’t report the trick to the authorities; they will be too ashamed of exposure. They are vain and avaricious and gullible.
For Lori this is just business; a negotiation, a hustle, a self-appointed service to ultra-wealthy society. She transacts her business coolly but with no swagger. She is alert and sceptical; she looks as if she doesn’t believe a word she hears. It’s as if she sees two kinds of art works: the copied and the not-yet copied.
After a half-hour or so of “The Christophers” (Neon), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, we recognise the film as a catalog of sorts of the ways in which the art world is fake. The forged paintings, the far-fetched prices, the excluded women, the entitled art-inheritor millionaires, the hyperbolised language (“extraordinary”), the champagne-drenched-opening-night luvvies’ cliques. At what point is an art work valuable—as a photograph of the original on a smartphone, or when transcribed onto a blank canvas? While what the forger does is illegal, the rest is not.
The vaguely hostile brother-and-sister heirs apparent hire Lori, in whose work they believe, to finish some paintings of their father’s. On several occasions they pretend to be alarmed by her ruthlessness. They slap their hands and try to blackmail her. She is not offended by their remarks. She swats them away. Their father is Julian Sklar, who became famous as a ruthless judge of an art-world “X-Factor.” It seemed to give him a great deal of satisfaction to belittle contenders, to fine-tune nasty jokes, and to pose as the most odious kind of cynical intellectual snob. “Sadly,” he says, “my art, not unlike my talent, departed this life long ago.” He has become a friendless bore who appears drunk by noon and lives in squalor inside the type of London house recently hit with the government’s mansion tax.
“If you’re a painter, I don’t want to know about it,” he says, believing Lori’s gimmick of applying for a vacancy as his assistant, “and if you claim to be a fan of that hideous art show…you can show yourself out now.” One of her jobs is to update his Wikipedia page. “I like my flattery,” he says, “I just have to believe it.” “Over seventy-five percent of enrolments at art schools are women,” he says. “Why are women not at seventy-five percent of museums?” The collection of incomplete paintings—known as The Christophers—is locked upstairs. “I won’t paint them,” Julian says. “I can’t paint them. My children are obsessed with that.”
Lori, played by Michaela Coel, gets the job. “Do you mind me in my dressing gown?” Julian, played by Ian McKellen, asks on her first day. “Actually I do,” she says. Is he allowed to ask if she has a boyfriend? “No, you aren’t allowed,” she says. “We are at work—you hold the power.” “No copies [of the keys] for the kids,” Julian says, “no matter how hard they beg.”
But Lori isn’t hard to find online and it’s not a great guise. “Perhaps you would like to tell me exactly why you are here,” Julian says. “I mean, to pay my rent,” Lori says. He quotes from an article she published. She had described him as “once a paradigm of progressive politics” who was “justifiably cancelled himself” before asking, “Will he go the way of the lava lamp?” She confesses. “And your cut?” “A third.” “And what made you think you could do it?” “How would you know how I would have painted them when even I didn’t know?” She describes his paintings as if writing a crisp piece of criticism for a quality newspaper. “You even used ochre,” she says, a colour “you called ‘sentimental slop.’” “I must say I find your prep impressive,” he says. “There wasn’t any prep,” Lori replies.
The screenplay spikes through the steady workmanship of the filmmaking: “Some sap in Chicago paid two million for [a painting] during Covid, I heard”; “trophies for the billionaire boys”; “She’s a train-wreck…he’s a shipwreck”; “I have no problem with questions, it’s the answers I can’t be bothered with”; “Never underestimate the internet prowess of someone who has spent decades googling himself.”
The subversive politics of “The Christophers”—a work of art—is that the art world is a lot of old hocus-pocus. It lampoons the pomp and hierarchy of British social class. The first time the children appear—bug-eyed with greed, oozing with conspicuous idleness, and conniving to swindle their old man—they are broadsided. “I told [Lori] to destroy [The Christophers],” Julian says. “But you can’t,” daughter says, “they aren’t yours.” “They are the world’s,” son says. “You stupid, stupid man,” daughter says. Later they offer Lori an extra £10,000. She demands £200,000. When she discovers they don’t have that much, she negotiates fifty percent of the sale with the steeliness of one of the “Dragon’s Den” investors—“fifty…fifty…fifty…fifty…good.” (This kind of pluck is perfected in “Relay,” which I reviewed in November.)
She wins. But so do they. Their whole life passes by as they wait for Julian to die so that they can revamp his house into a museum with an overpriced gift shop selling images of his art. They have pre-sold the finished Christophers to “a twenty-eight-year-old tech bro who is going to donate them for the tax credit” and then flaunt them in Las Vegas, the Mecca of fake. “Does the tech bro even know who I am?” Julian asks. “I assume,” Lori says, “after some googling.”
Adam Poole
16th May 2026
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
