This 2003 TV movie is an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.It was produced by Working Title Television for the United Kingdom and directed by Maurice Phillips. The film stars John Hannah in the lead role of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. The screenplay was written by Martyn Hesford. It premiered in the United States on October 18th, 2003. Due to the film's being made for television, it did not gain as much recognition or popularity as some other adaptations of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. However, Martyn Hesford's screenplay and Phillips' direction have made it a unique retelling of Stevenson's novella.
Summary
This film follows many of the same characters of Stevenson's novella. Naturally, the film's focus is on the character of Jekyll/ Hyde played by John Hannah. However, some characters from Stevenson's narrative are given greater character development and influence in Phillips' film. For example, the character of Sir Danvers Carew is more fully developed in this film than Stevenson's original character, which is somewhat unique to this movie. Not only does Carew play a prominent role in the film, he has a mysterious and secretive background that heightens his importance as a character. Yet, some characters are given lesser roles in this adaptation. Stevenson's character of Lanyon is reduced to a minor character in this film, and Utterson's main purpose is to demonstrate that he reads Jekyll's final confession. The addition of Jekyll's love interest, Mabel Mercer, also strays from the original text. This adds a gender context that Stevenson's narrative did not have, making it more relatable to modern audiences. In addition, this film also depicts much more explicit types of violence. This adaptation also contains the inclusion of a character named Ned, who works to help facilitate Jekyll's experiments. Furthermore, this film presents a more heightened and complex addiction narrative due to Hannah's depiction of Jekyll becoming dependent upon the identity of Hyde.
Jekyll is a doctor and a lecturer interested in proving that duality in humans exists and can be separated with a formula of his own invention. His ideas are rejected by the science and medical community, but he persists in his experiments anyways. At the beginning of the film, the character of Edward Hyde is actually a patient at a mental institution whom Jekyll plans to perform his experiments on. However, Hyde dies before Jekyll gets the chance to begin. Jekyll then decides to perform the experiments on himself instead.
When he injects the formula, he enters into a highly drugged state and, initially, has difficulty recalling anything that happened. He becomes very violent and morally corrupt as Hyde, reveling in cruelty and sexual depravity. The film depicts his violent actions as Hyde, including scenes of rape. The experiments are portrayed as drug injections, which strengthens the view of the story as addiction narrative. Consequently, Jekyll becomes more and more addicted to becoming Hyde, and struggles to keep the two personae separate. Arguably, by the end of the film, Jekyll does not succeed in separating the duality of man, but rather unifies the duality, thus making the two parts of human identity inseparable and integral.