New releases: I Swear, Hoppers, They Will Kill You and The Magic Faraway Tree

The unfor­giv­able cyn­ic in me thought that, if I were the pro­du­cer of a mod­est British inde­pend­ent film look­ing to release in cinemas across America, a scan­dal reveal­ing my sub­ject mat­ter­’s Tourette’s to a glob­al audi­ence at the Bafta awards might prove to be com­mer­cially use­ful, no mat­ter how offens­ive his verbal tics might be. 

That was a men­tal tic of my own that occurred before I had seen Kirk Jones’, I Swear, and real­ised that the film does all the hard work of help­ing audi­ences under­stand the syn­drome and needs no help from cheap stunts like the one that I imagined.

The sub­ject of I Swear, John Davidson, has been in the real life pub­lic eye since he was a teen­ager but the film wisely removes those com­plic­at­ing chapters – the role of the media in his tor­ment says more about the times than it does Davidson or Tourette’s – so we are left with a story about the impact of the afflic­tion itself and com­ing to terms with it.

Jones’ film has the look and feel of a Ken Loach pic­ture, aided by the pres­ence of the great Peter Mullan who arrives in the middle to res­cue Davidson and the pic­ture from spiralling into help­less­ness. As Tommy Trotter, the com­munity centre care­taker who offers Davidson his first job, Mullan shows all of us how to behave around people who are dif­fer­ent from ourselves and he does it so charm­ingly that nobody watch­ing should expect them­selves to be any different.

Mullan is a nation­al treas­ure but I sus­pect that his polit­ic­al prick­li­ness might pre­vent him get­ting (or accept­ing) the knight­hood that he deserves.

Robert Aramayo as Davidson gives you the kind of rev­el­at­ory per­form­ance that makes you for­get that you’ve actu­ally seen him in a few things before. He dis­ap­pears into the char­ac­ter of Davidson and films like this need someone to root for – he one hun­dred per­cent deliv­ers. I Swear is a very easy film to recom­mend (and you can hear my review on RNZ Culture 101 here).

Pixar has long ceased to be a reli­able sup­pli­er of anim­ated mas­ter­pieces but there’s still an undeni­able visu­al qual­ity to their work even when the story falls short. The char­ac­ter design in Hoppers is ter­rif­ic – check out the poster image to my left – but des­pite a strong cent­ral idea, the film itself only drifts to a conclusion.

Mabel (Piper Curda) is a teen­age con­ser­va­tion act­iv­ist who is fight­ing a lone battle to save her favour­ite peace­ful glade from destruc­tion due to a giant con­crete ring road – the kind of infra­struc­ture pro­ject that may­ors like Jon Hamm’s Jerry Generazzo build careers and cam­paigns on. Mabel dis­cov­ers that her col­lege bio­logy tutor is work­ing on a secret pro­ject to down­load (or should that be upload?) human brain­waves into ana­tom­ic­ally per­fect android anim­als so she hijacks a beaver (android) and goes under­cov­er to find out why none of the anim­als are fight­ing back. 

The setup is great and the con­clu­sion is not unsat­is­fy­ing but the middle is des­per­ately unfocused – fea­tur­ing a long car chase of all things – and Hoppers fails to live up to its own intern­al logic too often to really hit the spot.

They Will Kill You is an empty shell. Director Kirill Sokolov has some action-comedy chops but gives you no reas­on to care about any of it. Zazie Beets plays an ex-con in the city, look­ing for the sis­ter she aban­doned as a child. Based on a tip, she takes a job as a maid in the mys­ter­i­ous build­ing where her sis­ter was last seen. Turns out the job is just a front – she’s inten­ded to be a human sac­ri­fice used by the rich inhab­it­ants to pre­serve their ghoul­ish immor­tal­ity. Can she sur­vive long enough to find her sis­ter and escape both their fates?

The biggest mys­tery in the whole thing is what accent Patricia Arquette is doing as Maria, the build­ing manager.

Attempting to har­ness some of the magic of the Paddington tri­logy, screen­writer Simon Farnaby has attached him­self to anoth­er (sup­posedly) beloved English chil­dren’s fran­chise, Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree.

In terms of the human com­pon­ent, Farnaby has sens­ibly depar­ted from Blyton’s ori­gin­al mod­el. We fol­low a mod­ern fam­ily – Andrew Garfield is the fath­er, Claire Foy is the moth­er and I can­’t be bothered typ­ing the names of the three child act­ors – who are escap­ing the mod­ern world for a ‘good life’ in what the English call the ‘coun­tryside’.

For no good reas­on, they are advised nev­er to go to the loc­al woods but middle daugh­ter Fran does because she gets an invit­a­tion from loc­al pix­ie Silky (Nicola Coughlan).

In the woods, Fran finds a magic (not ter­ribly faraway, it must be said) tree pop­u­lated by weird char­ac­ters and a portal to even more amaz­ing worlds high in the sky.

The big prob­lem with this magic Faraway tree is Blyton. These magic­al char­ac­ters might be mean­ing­ful if you were a child in 1939 but all feel ter­ribly first-draft here in 2026. The world of the tree isn’t nearly as inter­est­ing – or as suc­cess­fully con­ceived – as the real world on the ground. Even then, Garfield’s dream of mak­ing a world-beating pasta sauce is frus­trat­ingly illogical.

The best news is that Michael Palin is still alive enough to be able to cameo. Hurrah for that.