Rory Haines writes convincing people when the plotting gives them room. Informer, created with Sohrab Noshirvani, earns our patience; his film screenplays have too often crowded out the people we want to watch.
Fi1m perspective
In Informer (2018), Nabhaan Rizwan’s Raza Shar becomes more interesting as we learn about him, even when the effort of keeping track of the story starts to intrude. Created and written with Sohrab Noshirvani, the six-part series gives Haines’s characters time to develop beyond their immediate use to a thriller. It is the strongest of his work we have reviewed. The broken-up storytelling can be absorbing, but each new complication risks making us think about the writing rather than the people. The characters make that effort worthwhile, though the plotting sometimes asks us to accept too much.
Haines and Noshirvani’s feature debut was Kevin Macdonald’s The Mauritanian (2021), with Michael Bronner also sharing screenplay credit. The film keeps interrupting its most interesting person to explain the work being done around him. We were moved by Tahar Rahim’s Mohamedou Ould Slahi, whose humour gives us someone to care about while the film keeps sending us back to the lawyers. Documents and arguments accumulate, but the screenplay finds too little discovery in them. Editor Justine Wright has to move between the lawyers and Slahi’s backstory, and those repeated shifts become wearing.
Black Adam (2022), written with Adam Sztykiel and Noshirvani, makes the problem harder to ignore. A ruthless protector ought to leave those he protects with difficult choices; here, the screenplay briefly considers the problem before arranging another fight. Dwayne Johnson gets too few chances to make the central figure interesting before the film asks us to care about a larger collection of heroes. Pierce Brosnan and Aldis Hodge bring welcome personality. Their presence helps, but it cannot give the crowded story the time it needs.
Across these collaborations, we would be wary of assigning either the good character work or the overcrowding to Haines alone. He and Noshirvani develop their scripts through extended conversation and argument before writing pages, and Informer is where that work most clearly reaches the screen. The films need more of its willingness to let people become interesting before asking them to carry another piece of plot. Start with Informer, provided a crime series with more complications than it needs does not put you off.
Biography
Rory Haines is a British screenwriter. He was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and graduated from the Columbia University MFA Film programme in 2012, where he met his frequent collaborator Sohrab Noshirvani.
The duo created the BBC and Amazon mini-series Informer (2018), which received a BAFTA nomination for best drama. Their feature debut was the screenplay for The Mauritanian (2021), adapted from Mohamedou Ould Slahi's memoir. They also wrote Black Adam (2022) and are credited on the forthcoming John Rambo (2027). Between 2019 and 2021 they received three BAFTA nominations for their work on Informer and The Mauritanian.
