The gently comic story of three children fleeing their sinister uncle across the Yorkshire moors is hampered by tougher, more disturbing scenes
One or two nice moments in this
British family adventure drama, a feature debut written and directed by the TV documentary-maker Richard Heap. But it needed something more stringent in the way of script development and script editing, and probably a bit more on the cutting room floor.
Mark Addy plays Reith, a single dad in Whitby who owns a ramshackle business giving donkey rides on the beach. He has three kids – Angie (Molly Windsor), Polly (Macy Shackleton) and Ben (Rhys Connah) – who are exasperated by their boozy old dad but love him all the same. Things are turned upside down when Reith’s sinister, threatening brother Blythe (Lee Boardman) turns up out of the blue. There’s a crisis, resulting in the three siblings making an extraordinary getaway on foot, across the Yorkshire landscape, with two donkeys surreally in tow, on a mission to find their estranged mum: Maggie (Tara Fitzgerald).