Film: Allelujah luvvies it up and then turns horribly sinister

Of course, a decent film will always keep you on your toes, but when it twists as disturbingly as this one you might legitimately wonder whether it hasn’t actually lost the plot.

For the most part we are in quirky Brits in adversity territory – just as the trailer promised: a bunch of elderly patients in a hospital, the Beth, facing closure. Their response is to ramp up the fund-raising and bring in a camera crew to highlight the fabulous work the institution is doing in the tragically unglamorous field of geriatric medicine.

And we have even got a cast of big name luvvies luvving it up just to underline its credentials. For the first three-quarters of the film, nothing terribly much happens in a movie not particularly concerned to go anywhere. Instead the disparate characters are drawn out, from David Bradley’s Joe with his troubled relationship with his son to poor Julia McKenzie, pursued by her own grotty family desperate that she live long enough for them to avoid inheritance tax; from Derek Jacobi’s Ambrose, fearful of the final visitor, to Judi Dench’s Mary, a woman with an interest in marginalia that eventually proves absolutely crucial to the story.

Lurking around is Russell Tovey as Colin Colman, Joe’s son but just as importantly he’s the management consultant at the health ministry who, irony of ironies, recommended Beth’s closure in the first place. Can he be persuaded that Beth is vital too? So it seems as he starts to spout about the vast inconnectedness of everything in the NHS.

Seeming to embody it all is Jennifer Saunders as Sister Gilpin, the very model of stern compassion and conscientiousness in the most trying circumstances; and Bally Gill as the perhaps rather over-angelic Dr Valentine, lover of all people, especially the elderly. Oh yes, we are heading towards the most glowing endorsement of the NHS, its people and the work they do in even the most crumbling buildings.

Except in a moment it all shifts seismically into the most ghastly dark territory. All our NHS workers settling down to applaud a song of praise to them will surely be furious. The Beth has been betrayed by the bureaucrats; but suddenly it feels like the NHS has been betrayed by this film.

However realistic the events might be, however much they do actually have precedent, the volte-face is utterly out of the blue, completely disorientating – and yet not remotely a strength. The film seems to undermine itself before heading off into a Covid coda which goes all poetically preachy and feels unconnected to all that has gone before. It almost feels like a third film in the one film.

You wander out feeling slightly dazed.

In the first hour and more, it opts for total predictability and some lovely character portraits but then rips absolutely everything up in favour of an oomph of darkness and then an oomph of sentimentality which rob the film of any coherent meaning.