You may struggle to find many glowing reviews for this film, but everything else I have seen written about it online seems to share one common compliment: Peter Mullan is fantastic in the lead role. If you have also seen all of those other reviews then you may as well skip this one. I'm in complete agreement with most people. This is an okay film, at best, but it's lifted up by Peter Mullan being fantastic in the lead role.
Mullan plays Kenneth, a tour guide in a small Scottish town who takes great pride in telling people all about a local notable figure, Sir Douglas Weatherford. Nobody really seems to understand the historical importance of the man though, or maybe Kenneth is in the wrong for trying to maintain the legacy of someone who has already been forgotten, if he was ever known at all, by so many. The town suddenly becomes very busy, however, when a very popular TV show is filmed there, resulting in an influx of fans, which means even more people who aren't all that interested in what Kenneth has to tell them.
What could have been a fantastic comedy drama exploring the ideas of tourism, the preservation of history, and small communities trying to stay thriving and relevant, often by any means necessary, is, sadly, a huge missed opportunity. Having lived in Edinburgh for numerous decades, I know very well what division is caused when businesses and entire areas focus on catering to the money coming in from the tourist industry. I also know that I have enjoyed visiting various small villages and sites throughout the UK, and further afield, and have been more than happy to play the role of the grinning tourist happy to be the centre of so much attention, relatively speaking, as I decided to spend some of my money on tat and souvenirs that often end up languishing in a box somewhere in the darkness of the attic.
Having given himself such a great starting point to work from, writer-director Seán Dunn helps himself further with a very good cast, a perfect location for the fictional area being depicted, and a unique and wonderful score from Gazelle Twin. Which all makes it even more frustrating that he doesn't do well enough when it comes to the clarity and sharpness of the points that he wants to make.
It would be redundant for me to praise Mullan here once again, take that as given, although it is worth saying that this is, for all the faults of the film itself, one of the best roles he's ever had, in terms of screentime and being allowed to carry a movie with a mix of humour and grit. Jakob Oftebro is pretty good, playing the star actor who becomes the lightning rod for what our main character so strongly dislikes, Lewis MacDougall is fun as a youngster who ends up assisting in an attempted push back against the pandering to the TV show fanbase, and both Saskia Ashdown and Gayle Rankin do very good work as women who, for different reasons, end up concerned for men in their lives.
I didn't chuckle much, I didn't really stay invested in the fate of the main character, and I didn't appreciate the many ways in which this fell flat. I do consider some of the film thought-provoking, but only in the way that I was often thinking about how there was a much better film to be made from this concept. But, and feel free to repeat after me, Mullan is fantastic in the lead role.
4/10
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