A GHOULISH AFFAIR...
IS THERE anybody there? If this supernatural farce had made it to the big screen, I suspect cinemas would have been eerily quiet. It’s hard to see who the filmmakers were aiming for with this ham-fisted adaptation of Noël Coward’s oft-revived 1941 play. The slapstick and cheap special effects were never going to attract the superhero crowd, while older audiences would have been dumbstruck by tin-eared attempts to update the dialogue.
Director Edward Hall has retained the 1930s’ setting and the bare bones of the plot in which blocked writer Charles Condomine accidentally summons the ghost of his first wife with the help of a bewildered fake medium.
Of course, this isn’t the first screen adaptation. In 1945, Margaret Rutherford summoned up huge laughs as potty ghost-botherer Madame Arcati. 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 planet. 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.
As there isn’t a single funny line in the updated dialogue (Coward’s mellifluous prose has been replaced with bland, modern, posh chatter), all this carrying on feels rather jarring. Perhaps the film’s late move to Sky Cinema has done the industry a favour.
If this had been a punter’s first big-screen experience since lockdown, it would have haunted them for months.
On Sky Cinema and NOW TV
Overdoing it: Dan Stevens and Isla Fisher