Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint review – Dickensian festive Britpic decorated by selection box of familiar faces

A cast including Richard E Grant, Celia Imrie, Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Nigel Planer warm up a formulaic narrative about a imperilled retirement community

The annual drive to expand the festive film canon begins unseasonably early with a modest, sentimentally inclined Britpic that opens like a penny-pinching John Lewis ad; thankfully, it improves from there. The titular Mr Flint (John Bradley) is a Napoleonic history buff whose animus towards late December dates from seeing his (French) mother drop dead amid the Christmas decorations; now he spends the holidays cavilling at carollers and insisting that the icy pavements of his native York come with health-and-safety warnings. This very much not being the kind of film to confirm a fellow in such beliefs, Aubrey is instead nudged towards a developer-targeted retirement community planning one last theatre production; and when the residents choose A Christmas Carol, it all but closes the book on where this film is heading.

The real hero here is casting director Lucy Amos; she gathers familiar faces who deserve a Christmas bonus for making the formulaic narrative seem far livelier than it is. Atop a mince-pie frosting of sugar, we get a welcome sprinkling of comic stardust; sure, you may struggle to identify Richard E Grant beneath the frizzy wig-and-’tache combo that transforms his toy shop owner Mr Hopkins into a modern Geppetto, but the care home alone gifts us Dave Johns as a former manager, Kiell Smith-Bynoe gardening under Karl Pilkington’s ever-irascible eye, and other eminent residents including Celia Imrie, Brian Bovell and Nigel Planer, whose Ghost of Christmas Present forms a funny little coda to the Nicholas Craig story.

Collectively, these old pros stage a show of fellow-feeling which Dickens himself might have cheered, and while Chris Boyle-McQuarry’s script mostly runs on familiar tracks, potent little tangents suggest the actors have themselves known amateur players and mirthless administrators in their time. Jim Broadbent’s sporadic narration is top-notch (you’d pay for the audiobook), while Imrie’s impromptu Scrooge audition shakes off cosiness and reconnects us forcefully with a foundational text. Director Jack Spring builds a kind of Costcutter Capra on these highlights, but the stronger scenes form their own sort of advert for how well-synced performers can rescue a project from mediocrity. Even before Aubrey Flint’s inevitable redemption, that’s quite touching in itself.