Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 12 August

Bookworm (Timpson, 2024)

On this day, 12 August, last year I reviewed Ant Timpson’s fam­ily adven­ture movie Bookworm. It’s been avail­able for home view­ing for a while now and it’s a strong con­tender for a fam­ily night in front of the box as it’s a) loc­al for New Zealanders and b) hasn’t been through the Disney-fication machine. It has some spine.

One of many pleas­ures to be found in Ant Timpson’s Bookworm is that the South Island land­scape gets the kind of glor­i­ous treat­ment that is nor­mally reserved for cer­tain big fantasy films. New Zealand plays itself, for a change, and Timpson’s eye (with cine­ma­to­graph­er Daniel Katz) for those wide expanses is a know­ing riff on how we are nor­mally shown those vis­tas, and the gag about going up to the rocks “where Liam Neeson played that talk­ing Lion” is a decent one at star Elijah Wood’s expense.

(From memory, though, Frodo’s jour­ney was to a very North Island Mount Doom and it was the rest of the fel­low­ship that got to traipse around Canterbury and Otago. I stand to be corrected.)

Wood plays Strawn, a down-on-his-luck Magician (or “illu­sion­ist”) who travels half way across the world to look after an eleven-year-old daugh­ter he has nev­er met, after her moth­er has an acci­dent with a toaster.

Mildred (Nell Fisher) has been prom­ised an exped­i­tion into the wil­der­ness to find evid­ence of the myth­ic­al Canterbury Panther, a big black cat that loc­als have been sight­ing for years without con­clus­ive proof.

Against his urb­an, soft-centred instincts, Strawn agrees to chap­er­one Mildred on this trip but it is her know­ledge of obscure bush­craft – gleaned from the books that gives the film its title – that gets them both into and out of trouble as the trip takes a much more adven­tur­ous turn than either was expecting.

The rela­tion­ship between Strawn and Mildred is nicely grown, helped by the fact the her pre­co­city stays just this side of being really annoy­ing and that Wood – as he often does – leaves his own ego at the door and is con­tent to look pretty ridicu­lous almost all of the time.

In the final cli­mactic chase both char­ac­ters are wear­ing their pyja­mas – very fetch­ing designs from Jaindra Watson but quite silly nonetheless.

And one final pleas­ure to cite: Northern Irish act­or Michael Smiley can still be pretty ter­ri­fy­ing even when he is ostens­ibly being funny, adding some grit to a very like­able fam­ily adven­ture film.

Also in the 12 August 2024 news­let­ter: the now-notorious pot­boil­er It Ends With Us, National Theatre Live: Dear England (which will get anoth­er recom­mend­a­tion here as soon as it returns for home view­ing) and The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan.

Where to watch Bookworm

Aotearoa: Streaming on Prime Video or Neon

Australia: Streaming on Foxtel Now or Binge

Canada: Streaming on Crave

Ireland: Not cur­rently available

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Prime Video or The Roku Channel (free with ads) or Kanopy1

UK: Streaming on NowTV