The first half of the film features Jack gearing up for a lunch with his agent (deliciously played by Clare Higgins), and then the fallout from that meeting, where she tells him a producer from Hollywood is interested in his "Decades of Death" project. All he needs to do, the only thing, is put on a suit and meet the guy for dinner. But once he is back in his flat, the hallucinations take over again, and he becomes convinced that the Hollywood guy is somehow related to one of the grisly Victorian murderers on his wall.
At any rate, the situation goes south, and his panic is exacerbated by the fact that he does not own a suit, his socks are filthy, and he is afraid of going to the laundromat. Mills and the production design team pull out all the stops in the first half, filming Pegg in a distorted and fantastical way, so that never once are we outside his delusional viewpoint. Shadows loom around Jack and cloaked figures seem to float at the end of the dark hallway.