Keeping Mum film review

certificate_15

KEEPING MUM

The only serious questions to ask after sitting through Keeping Mum are how on earth did this film get made, and how did it attract the calibre of actor of Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott Thomas? They may well have thought that they were signing up for a latterday Ealing comedy or a zany British Coen Brothers-style farce, but in fact the end result is at best curious, and at worst downright embarrassing.

Scott Thomas plays Gloria Goodfellow, a middle class housewife whose husband (Rowan Atkinson) is the village vicar, a priest who is clearly more besotted with the man upstairs than with his wife. Bored, Gloria begins an affair with the local golf pro (Patrick Swayze, who provides the film's very few laughs), a sleazeball who promises her trips to Mexico but it actually more interested in bedding her wild teenage daughter.

The Goodfellow's domestic life is disturbed by the arrival of their new housekeeper Grace (Maggie Smith). Grace seems the perfect influence on them and soon they are acting like a proper family again. But strange things are afoot in the village - beginning with the disappearance of a yapping dog and culminating with people themselves going missing.

Writer and director Niall Johnson has attempted to create a whimsical murder mystery but fails to deliver any real laughs with a script that can only be described as creaky. There is also no sense of tension as the big secret of the film is revealed to the audience in an opening sequence, and when the characters finally click, their reactions are preposterous.

With a lack of decent material, the cast battle on bravely and should be left out of any recriminations, although it has to be said that Rowan Atkinson's befuddled vicar routine went out of fashion in the last century. Audiences are likely to be left mystified b the whole affair and it's more than likely that they will keep mum about it, rather than recommending it to friends or family.

Paul Hurley