Director: Jeremy Brock, UK, 15, 98min
Stars: Michelle Duncan, Tamsin Egerton, Rupert Grint
On general release
There is something pleasingly bleak about the writer/director Brock’s semi-autobiographical debut feature. Harry Potter alumnus Grint takes the gauche teenage role in a North London Harold and Maude scenario. His oppressive family have shaped him into a brooding, poetry-scribbling adolescent whose only contact with the outside world is via the church group his mother organises. A future of inarticulate interactions with the opposite sex beckons, until Ben takes a job running errands for an ageing luvvie (a wonderful Julie Walters). Evie is riotously foul-mouthed, permanently sozzled and just the tonic Ben needs. It’s the subtle shadow of tragedy and loneliness beneath the bonhomie — the glimpses of a woman wounded by the indifference of a public she once entertained — that makes Evie more than a broad comic sketch. What lets this engaging film down is an inappropriately declamatory ending that is at odds with the tone of the rest of the picture.
WENDY IDE