RELEASED NANDOR FODOR AND THE TALKING MONGOOSE

UK 12/ROI 12, 96 mins

Streaming now exclusively on Prime Video, available from May 6 on digital platforms

Starring: Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver, Christopher Lloyd, Tim Downie, Ruth Connell, Jessica Balmer, Paul Kaye, Gary Beadle and the voice of Neil Gaiman.

In the 1930s, Austro-Hungarian-born lawyer Nandor Fodor (Simon Pegg) gains notoriety as the world’s leading parapsychologist by debunking the otherworldly with “believable, observable facts”

Accompanied by trusted assistant Anne (Minnie Driver), Nandor travels to the Isle of Man at the behest of Dr Harry Price (Christopher Lloyd) from the London Spiritualist Alliance to probe the perplexing case of the Irving family.

Liverpool businessman James Irving (Tim Downie) and wife Margaret (Ruth Connell) claim a talking mongoose named Gef (voiced by Neil Gaiman) frequents the farm they share with their 17-year-old daughter Voirrey (Jessica Balmer).

Nandor suspects gi ed ventriloquist Voissey may be responsible for the mass delusion and farmhand Errol (Gary Beadle) seems to confirm as much when he confides: “You and I both know there ain’t no Gef”.

However, the elusive mammal knows a great secret about Nandor that shakes the parapsychologist to his sceptical core.

Based on an outlandish true story, Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose is a curiously restrained comedy drama that flirts with existential questions about faith, fantasy and the positive impact one mysterious creature can have on an entire community.

Writer-director Adam Sigal doesn’t perform any sleights of hand or on-screen wizardry to convince us that Gef might be anything other than a product of Voissey’s ability to throw her voice.

Pegg delivers a solid performance as a man of science haunted by one great loss, and Driver o ers lightly e ervescent comic relief as his golly-gasping sidekick. Truth should be stranger than fiction but here, it is disappointingly humdrum.