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Despite a talented cast and an imaginative director, this messy adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short story of aliens visiting Croydon during the height of punk falls short of its potential by a wide mark
John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short story concerning cannibalistic aliens is a perplexing film, but not a terribly interesting one. Despite a cast that includes the triple-whammy of Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning and Ruth Wilson, and a director capable of creating a film as sublimely subversive as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the result doesn’t add up to much, coming across like an extended episode of a BBC kids' show from the early 90s with a few lewd jokes thrown in.
It’s a story of young love in 1970s Croydon, where a teenage punk (Sharp) falls in with a band of travelling performance artists. Travellers they are – intergalactic ones that hop across the galaxy in their humanoid forms gaining new experiences and eating their own offspring before vanishing back into the ether.
Tonally, Cameron Mitchell’s film is all over the place. Its punk sensibility is about as authentic as the Disneyland Castle, while the humour is at Inbetweeners level, with jokes about ‘anal cherries’ and homosexual awakenings. Nicole Kidman, sporting an outlandish cockney accent and channeling Vivienne Westwood, is fun though. [Joseph Walsh]