This is a terrific role for Ian McKellen in a film that frankly doesn’t feel like typical multiplex fare. I saw it on a Friday night at the cinema with only a couple of other people in the audience, which somehow suited its intimate and cerebral atmosphere. Directed by Steven Soderbergh and set in London’s art world, ‘The Christophers’ revolves around art forgery, legacy and creative obsession.

Michaela Coel plays Lori, an art restorer hired by the children of McKellen’s ageing artist Julian to complete a famous unfinished series of portraits depicting a former lover. The paintings have been abandoned for decades, with Julian suffering from a kind of artistic paralysis, and there’s an air of mystery surrounding both the paintings and the man himself. Lori, meanwhile, has her own motives. Years earlier, she encountered Julian when she was young, only for him to belittle her work, and there’s an undercurrent of revenge in what she agrees to do.

Posing as his new assistant, she begins secretly forging and completing the works so that, after Julian’s death, the family can secure a fortune. But Julian is far from naïve. He quietly investigates Lori and gradually becomes aware that something deceptive is unfolding. What’s fascinating is that the deception seems almost to reignite his creativity. Julian starts painting again, and the dynamic between artist and assistant becomes increasingly blurred. At points, we’re not entirely sure who is influencing whom.

The film asks some rich questions about art itself – about authenticity, ownership, memory and how paintings can reveal emotional truths over time. Because Lori is a skilled restorer and forger, she notices hidden layers in Julian’s canvases that even he has forgotten or overlooked, allowing the paintings to become a kind of map of his emotional life.

There are shades here of ‘Sleuth’, particularly in the psychological gamesmanship between the two leads inside a large London house, and also echoes of ‘Gambit’, with its elaborate plan that inevitably unravels once put into practice. Another pleasure is Julian’s vanity – at one point he literally Googles himself, which is how he begins to uncover Lori’s scheme.

What makes the film especially interesting is its moral ambiguity. Lori may be a forger, but she possesses a certain integrity, while Julian, for all his ego and manipulativeness, becomes oddly sympathetic. The relationship between them is constantly shifting. Like ‘Where the Money Is’, a Paul Newman comedy from the very early 2000s, it’s about an older figure with questionable ethics preparing for one final gamble, hoping perhaps for meaning as much as victory.