BLITHE SPIRIT
12★
On Sky Cinema and NOW TV
We’ll never know what Noël Coward would have thought of this new adaptation of his supernatural farce. But if his spirit had visited the handsome Art Deco sets, he would surely have hurled a few pieces of fine china at the cast and crew.
Panto-style acting and clunky screenwriting mean this lifeless romp falls well short of the dated but still far more entertaining 1945 version.
That film was most memorable for the performance for Margaret Rutherford’s deliciously potty medium Madame Arcati who accidentally summons the ghost of Charles Condomine’s dead wife.
Director Edward Hall has handed the plum role to a far-from-spirited Judi Dench. With nothing funny to say, Dench seems to have given up at first rehearsals. While her co-stars mug furiously, she plays it completely straight. It feels like she has materialised from a different film.
Leslie Mann plays the vampish spook at more or less the right pitch, but Dan Stevens overdoes it as the nerve-frazzled writer while the unfathomably successful Isla Fisher is reliably annoying as his shrill second wife.
Perhaps the late move to Sky’s movie channel has done the cinema industry a favour. If this had been a punter’s first big screen experience since lockdown, it would have haunted them for months.