The story being told in Rogue Agent fits the very definition of the phrase “stranger than fiction,” in that one would be hard-pressed to believe its tale of a merciless con artist who posed as a British intelligence agent with MI-5 and used his influence to kidnap and terrorize young women across England and over a period of many years. Surely, no one could carry on such a deception without raising alarms and getting caught, yet here is Robert Hendy-Freegard, who did just that for more than a decade and was finally brought down in a lengthy sting operation in 2002. His story doesn’t quite end there, as the denouement and coda acknowledge the trial at which he was charged with enough crimes to send him to prison for life ― but fails to inform us of the equally unbelievable circumstances of his release after just two years.
The events were astonishing, and they inspired an article by Michael Bronner, the recent documentary miniseries “The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman,” and now in a narrative feature scripted by Bronner and directors Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson. With the right treatment, this could be a successful version of the recent trend of dramatizations of recent historical events of an espionage-flavored variety. Hendy-Freegard is almost certainly the type of figure about whom such a movie could be made, but the filmmakers have decided to approach this story with a level of detachment only befitting a just-the-facts-ma’am procedural. There is tragedy to be explored in this story of deception, as well as anger to stoke.
James Norton plays Robert ― who went by the name of “Rob Hansen” during his conman exploits of finding women and “recruiting” them to be intelligence analysts for agents who never existed ― in a solid performance of a man who is himself a performer. His one rule is to look his prospective victims in the eye just long enough to determine their eye color, which pulls them in without making them feel uncomfortable. As we see in the film’s prologue, he also convinces the women to borrow money from their family in order to pay off all debt ― a way of making them untraceable during their “missions.” The first victim is Sophie (a haunting Marisa Abela), whose long-term captivity is the film’s most effective and affecting subplot.
Instead of centering around Sophie, however, the screenwriters base the story around Alice Archer (Gemma Arterton), an attorney who meets Robert on her way to work one morning, falls head over heels in love with him, discovers that certain aspects of his identity are in question and eventually leads the charge to investigate his actions. This is where the procedural elements of the movie come in, as Alice teams up with a private investigator (Julian Barratt), a reporter (Shazad Latif), and, finally, FBI Special Agent Harland (Edwina Findley) to bring him down. Much of this material has been fictionalized from the real stories of the women he targeted, and, oddly, a significant amount of time has been excised entirely.
Perhaps this was necessary in the long run, to protect the identities of those victims, but the scope of the story becomes disappointingly limited in the process, calling into question why it has been told, beyond the shocking and lascivious nature of it. Arterton is quite good as Alice, seemingly a composite of several real women involved in the story (though mostly borrowed from a particular one whose fate was very different), but she has been written as a distractingly inconsistent character ― observant and cautious in one scene and mostly just disappointed by the romantic entanglements in the next. Rogue Agent is simply too streamlined in its structure for its own elegant simplicity to be effective.
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