FILM OF THE WEEK THE GREATEST HITS

94 mins. Streaming from April 12 exclusively on Disney+. Starring:

Lucy Boynton, Justin H Min, David Corenswet, Austin Crute, Retta, Andie Ju, Tom Yi, Jenne Kang.

Two years after the tragic car accident which killed her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet) and left her with a traumatic head injury,

Los Angeles-based record producer Harriet Gibbons (Lucy Boynton) is a hermit “haunted by music”.

Hearing a song that played during her four-year romance with Max magically propels Harriet back in time for the duration of the track to relive that golden moment from their timeline.

Consequently, Harriet wears ear plugs and noise-cancelling headphones and she works in a library where silence is golden.

At night, Harriet listens intently to vinyls, looking for a musical cue that will allow her to change the past.

“You lost yourself when you lost him,” best friend Morris (Austin Crute) warns her.

Harriet’s carefully ordered routine of teary-eyed reminiscence is thrown into disarray when she meets Jackson (Justin H Min) at a grief counselling session and a spark of romance promises to ignite if she starts living in the present rather than the past.

The Greatest Hits is a fantastical drama comedy that confidently remixes genre tropes with a time-travelling premise undone by warped logic.

Harriet’s headphones block out sung lyrics but magically allow her to hear softly spoken conversations and she could easily apply the car’s emergency handbrake to change automotive destiny.

Corenswet’s dreamy love interest only exists in flashback, reduced to a plot device to block Boynton and Min’s appealingly sweet pairing.

Writer-director Ned Benson’s script rations character development, weakening the emotional wallop of a final-reel twist that feels like it has been reverse-engineered to maximise heartbreak.