I Came By (2022)

I Came By is a British crime thriller from Babak Anvari, and it arrives with a certain social conscience tucked inside its genre clothing. Toby, a politically minded graffiti artist, breaks into wealthy homes and leaves a taunting message. His target is a retired High Court judge named Sir Hector Blake, who presents as progressive while keeping a man imprisoned in his basement. The film's most pointed thread concerns Omid, a gay Iranian asylum seeker whose precarious immigration status makes him vulnerable to Blake's violence. This is not incidental. The plot turns on the way systemic prejudice can hand a predator his victims, and the film treats that mechanism with grim seriousness.

Lizzie, Toby's widowed mother, becomes the engine of the back half. She is not a passive mourner. She follows, investigates, and takes real risks, which gives the film a feminist pulse without turning her into a slogan. The anti-capitalist strain is also clear: a working-class vandal versus a judge who performs virtue while hoarding power. The racial consciousness runs through the asylum plot and Blake's family history, where an Indo-Persian lover and a cruel father figure into the judge's damaged psychology. The cast is diverse, but the film uses that diversity in service of the thriller. It rarely stops to explain itself. Critics found the political messaging blunt, yet the film prefers suspense to sermons. Its lecture energy is faint.

What the film does not do is equally telling. It has no interest in climate, body image, neurodivergence, or revising history. It is a fictional crime story, not a historical corrective. The result is a messy, mid-tier Netflix thriller with a memorable Hugh Bonneville performance and a few ideas that stick. It wants to be Hitchcock with a social edge, and it gets halfway there. The social edge is real, but it is delivered through plot, not podium. A respectable vintage, if not a great one.