WITTY, ENGAGING and wildly inventive, Skeletonstrumpets the arrival of a notable new talent. Writer-director Nick Whitfield rightly took home the Michael Powell Award from this year's Edinburgh Film Festival for this splendid supernatural comedy; attending critics soon piled on such plaudits as "The New Charlie Kaufman".
Our heroes, Davis and Bennett, (Ed Gaughan and Andrew Buckley) are travelling spiritual hygienists. When regression therapy and theta healing fail, these gentlemen are available to (literally) exorcise the skeletons from your closet.
Trudging across the sublime if somewhat purgatorial Derbyshire countryside between jobs, surly Davis and bumbling Bennett prattle endlessly about co-workers and such random topics as Rasputin. Their low-level grumbling escalates into proper trouble when their intimidating overseer (played with relish by Jason Isaacs) sends them off to an isolated cottage.
Here, a desperate woman (Paprika Steen) is, after eight years, still digging holes in the garden in the hope of discovering her missing husband. Her daughter (Tuppence Middleton), a sulky elective mute, is little help, and the fellows’ antiquated equipment is suddenly on the fritz. It doesn’t help that Davis has been glow chasing, his profession’s answer to a dope dealer swiping from his own stash.
Can our heroes get it together and solve this unnerving crisis? We do hope so, but we’re even more anxious that this tremendous film debut finds the audience it so richly deserves.
