Parky At the Pictures (2/5/2025)

(Reviews of Two to One;Swimming Home; Cloud; and Where Dragons Live)

TWO TO ONE.

When Natja Brunckhorst was making a name for herself as the drug-addicted teenage protagonist of Uli Edel's Christiane F. (1981), few thought that the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down before the end of the decade. Now a writer and director, Brunckhorst indulges in a little Ostalgie along the lines of Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye Lenin! (2003) in Two to One, a comedy that turns on actual events surrounding the 1990 Wiedervereinigung.

Not everyone in the German Democratic Republic was thrilled about the prospect of being subsumed into the Federal German Republic. Even those who had long since become disillusioned with the Communist Party had misgivings about the capitalist system into which they were about to be pitched and their fears were scarcely assuaged by the ruling that East Germans had just six days in July 1990 to exchange their Ostmarks for Deutschmarks at the unfavourable rate of two for one.

In Halberstadt, the hot summer provides an excuse for eating outdoors for Maren (Sandra Hüller) and Robert (Max Riemelt), although neither is happy because the local factory has closed down and they are out of work. Maren's mood is not helped by the return from Hungary of Volker (Ronald Zehrfeld), an old flame who shows up just as her teenage son, Jannik (Anselm Haderer), scampers home with the cops in pursuit after he daubs anti-unification slogans on a housing estate wall.

Maren is learning French and hopes the fresh start will lead to a more exciting life. But Robert doesn't share her wanderlust or her optimism, as he would be content to stay where he is. While having a late-night drink in a closed-down bar, Robert and Volker notice vans heading towards the underground bunker where the Party stored secret materials. Robert's uncle, Markowski (Peter Kurth), reveals that the government has dumped its stash of Ostmarks because they would be too expensive to incinerate. The friends hit upon the idea to steal as much of the cash as they can and have Markowski open a bank account as a careful saver and split the proceeds.

Maren joins them on the recce, with Markowski demanding a cut of whatever they steal, as he has to keep the other guards distracted while they fills sacks. Although they're chased along the corridors by a trigger-happy guard, they escape with their booty and feel triumphant at having put one over on the state.

They then learn from a Wessi selling saucepans door to door that they have three more days to spend the notes as legal tender. Therefore, in true socialist spirit, they enlist their neighbours in a spending spree that would enable them to buy what luxury goods they wanted and then sell the rest to recoup splittable cash.

The elderly Käte (Ursula Werner) buys from salesmen at bargain prices and allows her flat be used to store goods and ferry them down by pulleys to waiting vehicles. Andrea (Tilla Kratochwil) does a brisk trade from her yellow Barkas van and Volker is so pleased with the profits that he buys everyone strawberries. However, Lunkewitz (Martin Brambach) objects to communal money being used for an individual gesture and he calls a meeting to demand a formalisation of the accounting systems. Volker is appalled and warns that greed breeds greed in reminding everyone of their socialist upbringing and the benefits of an ideology predicated on fairness.

As a veteran of the Depression, the war, and the GDR, Käte volunteers to be treasurer, even though Lunke distrust anyone to hold his share. Maren persuades Volker to return to the fold and confides in him that Robert doesn't know that Dini (Lotte Shirin Keiling) is Volker's daughter. She has just fetched herself a giant teddy bear, while Jannik has built a skateboard from some roller skates. But not everyone approves of what's going on and a report is filed with the Stasi. Moreover, a banker in Frankfurt has found 200 and 500 OM notes in circulation and, knowing these were never issued in the GDR, he realises that someone has found a stash and slipped it into the money supply.

Suspecting that something is going on between Maren and Volker, Robert tries to keep people calm on the last day that OM are legal. But Käte informs him that some of the DMs that she has been guarding in washing machines in the laundry area have been stolen. Adding to his woes, Maren has suggested that they pool their resources to buy the factory and ensure they all have jobs, as Markowski has told them that Ossis are going to suffer after the union, as the Wessis think they are ignorant and are going to ruin the West German economy.

Deciding that the factory idea is their best bet, Robert and Volker abduct a diplomat from the airport and talk him into using his extended period of currency exchange to shift huge amounts of OM abroad. This means another raid on the bunker, only they get caught by the guards. Fortunately, Jannik has the nous to lower microwaves and coffee makers to use as bribes and they get away scot free.

Markowski is smartened up and sent to negotiate the purchase and he returns deflated to announce that the price was one mark. While this disgusts them, as it exposes the contempt the Wessis have for them, they get a further shock when they discover that the factory has been secretly trading with Sweden, when the official version was that deals for the metal `thingies' the plant produces could only be cut with other Iron Curtain countries. Realising that they have been caught in between corrupt Communists and capitalists alike, the group vow to operate more transparently in the future.

Robert learns he is not Dini's father and Robert decides it's best to leave. However, Jannik gets caught dealing with a slacker and gets caught. The Deutschebank is powerless to prosecute them and the Party is keen to avoid a scandal. So, everyone is set free and treated to a holiday on a Baltic Island. While there, Dini reveals that she has stuffed her giant bear with DMs and she agrees to share them on condition that the factory now produces cuddly toys.

Closing captions reveal that a theft did take place from Bunker Complex 12 and that the culprits were never caught. The remaining OMs were only burned in 2002, while only a handful of East German businesses remained afloat after 1990. One of them made stuffed toys.

This cosy detail sums up a film that owes much more to Ealing Studios than DEFA, the state-owned East German company that supervised production between 1946 and 1991. The most obvious comparison has to be made with Alexander Mackendrick's Whisky Galore! However, Henry Cornelius's Passport to Pimlico (both 1949) also comes to mind, as the downtrodden residents of an embattled enclave exploit a loophole to improve their lot at the expense of a faceless system. What makes this mild-mannered comedy so appealing is the fact that the ensemble has been drawn exclusively on actors from the old east, with the quirks and the quips being democratically apportioned between them. Indeed, even the best-known star, Sandra Hüller, is very much part of the corps, with her domestic ménage being just one of many interweaving plotlines.

Brunckhorst's screenplay passes gentle comment on the flaws of the systems under scrutiny, while also alluding to the legacies that continue to be felt in the present day. However, she makes deft use of the efforts of production designers Florian Kaposi and Jenny Roesler and set decorator Felicity Good, while Brunckhorst also merits praise for her costume designs. A little more might have been made of the extent to which the old order had broken down by this stage in the GDR's countdown to obsolescence. But the decision to forego a Stasi presence like the one in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (2006) proves wise, as this is too whimsical to withstand such a heavy burden.

SWIMMING HOME.

Renowned for his commercials and work for fashion houses, video artist Justin Anderson examined unexpected encounters in the shorts, Jumper (2014) and The Idyll (2016). He returns to the theme in his feature debut, an adaptation of Deborah Levy's 2011 Booker-nominated novel, Swimming Home, which switches the action from France to Greece.

Poet Josef (Christopher Abbott) and combat journalist wife Isabel (Mackenzie Davis) have taken a house by the beach for the summer with their 15 year-old daughter, Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills). Arriving back from the airport after picking up their friend, Laura (Nadine Labaki), they find a naked stranger floating in the swimming pool. She is Kitti (Ariane Labed), a botanist friend of Vito the handyman (Anastasios Alexandropoulos), who is offered the use of the guest cottage.

Quickly befriending Nina, Kitti persuades her to show her around her parents' bedroom and discovers that Isabel is always grumpy after returning from an assignment and that Josef has long stopped writing and has become increasingly morose. He fled Bosnia during the war and Kitti borrows one of his books without permission before promising to show Nina where the boys hang out on the beach. For a supposed stranger, she seems to know a good deal about her hosts.

While the others sound each other out over supper (with Kitti asking much but revealing little other than the fact that her `mother was a river'), Isabel goes to a club to watch an erotic dance display. Kitti claims roots are amazing because they solve problems without brains and Josef confides in Laura (who taught him and Isabel at the Sorbonne) that he wishes his wife hadn't been so generous with her hospitality. Nina is impressed, however, as she fails to realise that Kitti is deliberately pushing people's buttons.

Isabel hauls Kitti out of the pool early next morning and wraps her in a towel. She chops breakfast fruit with Laura and confesses that she feels more detached from her everyday home world each time she returns from a war zone. Laura is curious why she has opted to parade Kitti in front of Joself when she knows how promiscuous he is, but she insists she was just being convivial. They giggle as they ogle the handsome Vito and Isabel teases Josef that the rat under the sink has stolen his pen.

Kitti offers to show Josef where the monks used to grow herbs. She nibbles hemlock and belladonna and asks why he stopped writing. As he tries to avoid answering, Kitti reminds him that his parents left him a Bosnian wood and he demands to know what she wants of him. Crouching beside him, she explains that she is there for him and smiles when he says he doesn't want her. When Nina finds them in the hope they can go to the beach, Kitti spits on her hand and wipes it across Josef's beard.

While she takes Nina to a rocky inlet adorned with adonic hunks, Josef vomits after getting home. Isabel seems unconcerned, but she is curious about his reaction to Kitti and his eagerness for her to leave. When he wakes from a nightmare, he finds Kitti waiting for him outside and she calls him `Yusuf' in inquiring about his parents abandoning him in Bosnia. Turning away, he finds Isabel beside him and he reveals that he can't move his hand.

Vito digs a hole in the garden on the orders of the owners and Laura ribs Isabel about choosing the house because of him rather than its amenities. When Josef finds Nina asleep in Kitti's bed after staying out all night, he tells Isabel that he wants her to go. She insists on a reason and scoffs when he claims she scares him. Scolding him for being immature and stuck in the past, she suggests he writes something new, but he claims he no longer feels anything to stir his creativity. Sidling out, Isabel warns him that she will leave if Kitti does.

Strolling down to the water, Isabel asks a boatman holding a spluttering flare to take her with him. But he replies he's not going anywhere, so she lays on the rocks in the sun. Meanwhile, Josef gets so annoyed by the sight of Kitti covering a bikini-clad Nina's back with cherries that he punches Vito, who is wielding an auger drill in the shadow of a parasol whose top has been rolled to resemble a glans.

Taking Nina fishing, Josef tries to apologise and she accuses him of being weird. He insists he loves her and she is touched. When they show Kitti the sea slug they have caught, however, she shames Josef into taking it back to the sea and informs him in his native language that she has come to take him home to his parents. Isabel returns as her husband shuffles past and sits beside the pool, as her daughter reclines and a topless Kitti swims under relentless sun.

Josef apologises to Vito, as they drive to sea. However, he orders him to pull over and he dumps the sea snail upside down on some hot paving slabs. Meanwhile, Kitti and Isabel take Nina riding at Ponyland (on the nosedly, her mount is called Oedipus). They discuss the fact that Isabel had never wanted to be a mother and Kitti revels that she has such an immunity to the wild-growing poisons that she has herself become toxic. Isabel laments that she can no longer help her husband, as much as she loves him, and she asks Kitti to leave.

They hug just as Josef gets a stinging sensation in his calf (where Kitti had urinated on him while examining the sea snail beside the pool) and he limps home after insisting on getting out of the car. Determined to stop Laura from leaving, Isabel leads Nina and Oedipus into a restaurant, where she dismisses the protests of the owner with a haughty sense of entitlement. Laura shakes her head, as Isabel informs her that Josef knows everything (but she doesn't say what about). He is talking to Kitti, who asks if he is still afraid after he tells her that he would rather have died with his parents than survive after being abandoned.

As Josef admits to having recognised Kitti the moment he saw her, he asks if she will take care of him. She appears to crab walk across his supine body, as Isabel watches a dancer moving in a similar way at her kinky nightclub. She walks home and sits beside Nina's bed. Confused, the teenager asks what's going on and rushes out to find a naked Josef dead in the pool. Mother and daughter jump in to retrieve his body and Isabel sobs, as Nina calls for help.

If points were awarded for each time a film influences another, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Theorem (1968) would surely be close to the top of the league. Traces of two pictures its shadow has already fallen across, Jacques Deray's La Piscine (1969) and François Ozon's Swimming Pool (2003), are similarly evident in this self-consciously enigmatic adaptation, which uses its transposition from France to Greece as an excuse for tossing a little Weird Wave gnomicness into the mix.

There's even a gauche homage to Luis Buñuel's palm-scurrying ants, as the fiftysomething Slade School graduate seeks to brandish his cinematic credentials. Dazzlingly abetted by cinematographer Simos Sarketzis, Justin Anderson proves himself to be a talented image maker. He sets his stall out in the credit sequence that makes use of an inverted camera to posit the notion of a world being turned upside down. But, while this succeeds in disorientating the viewer, the surfeit of oblique angles and skewed compositions become such a distraction that it comes to seem as though Anderson is resorting to such gambits to disguise the fact that there's less going on here than meets the eye. Indeed, all many will take away from this mannered, muddled melodrama are the assertions that some open windows are not to be climbed through and that `Socrates was an arsehole.'

Exposing his shortcomings as a storyteller, Anderson's tinkerings with Levy's narrative feel fussy rather than inspired or essential, with the result that the allegorical constructs masquerading as characters remain cocooned because they are too mopey to fight their fate or help each other. This impacts upon the performances, with Christopher Abbott, Mackenzie Davis, and Ariane Labed delivering their lines with same excruciating archness that (despite some disconcerting cutting by Napoleon Stratogiannakis) also seeps into Anderson's pacing of the action and his use of the peculiar blend of choral grumbling and apian droning concocted by Greek electronica artist, Coti K. Yet, for all its lugubrious affectation and occasionally risible sense of self-importance, this is no worse than A Bigger Splash, Luca Guadagnino's preening and over-praised 2015 remake of the infinitely superior, La Piscine.

CLOUD.

When it comes to chillers and thrillers, Kiyoshi Kurosawa doesn't waste words when it comes to titles. Now, following Cure (1997), Pulse (2001), Loft (2005), and Creepy (2016) comes Cloud, which will put the wind up anyone who has ever sold or purchased anything online.

Mild-mannered Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) works in a clothing factory. When owner Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) offers him a promotion, he turns it down because he gets a bigger kick out of reselling items online under the user name `Retel'. Making a massive profit on the 30 medical devices he buys as a job lot for 90,000 yen and sells for 200,000 each, Ryosuke decides to quit and buys a large lakeside house so that his materialistic girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), can move in with him. He also distances himself from mentor, Muraoka (Masataka Kubota), and turns down the chance to join him in a new online venture.

Shaken after a tripwire causes his scooter to crash, Ryosuke is further spooked when someone knocks on his door after the power goes off while he's packing. Fearing that the unknown caller is an unhappy customer. he hides in the darkness and waits for them to leave.

Having moved in, Ryosuke takes on a new assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), who is given strict instructions not to look at Retel's PC screen. However, he comes in handy when Ryosuke reports someone for throwing an auto part through a window and cop Hojo (Toshihiro Yagi) asks whether the designer handbags he is selling are counterfeits. Needing to get the stock out of the house, Ryosuke borrows Sano's car and bumps into Miyake when he takes the knocked-down bags to the depot for delivery. He warns Ryosuke about the perils of going rogue and feels nervous about being targeted by rivals and disgruntled customers.

While Ryosuke is in Tokyo bulk buying action figures from a comic shop, Akiko attempts to flirt with Sano and is so cross when he spurns her that she packs and leaves. Unnerved by the number of threats on his webpage, Ryosuke fires Sano after he offers some suggestions because sales have been dipping. As he leaves, Sano warns Ryosuke that people are furious with his rip-off sales and that they are trying to find Ratel's real identity.

Leading the hunt are Muraoka and Takimoto, who try to burst into Ryosuke's home and he has to flee into the woods. He holes out in a shack and Takimoto guns down a ranger who confronts them when they try to break in. Doubling back, Ryosuke finds Akiko back at the house and he agrees to flee with her and start again. However, he is kidnapped by the gang and driven to an abandoned steel mill, where they plan to burn him alive on live streaming. much to the delight of his embittered former classmate, Miyake (Amane Okayama). Akiko has followed at a distance, while Sanoo has used the GPS on Ryosuke's phone to track him down.

He shoots a couple of the vigilantes while the others are fetching the equipment to film the roasting. Ryosuke is relieved, but puzzled when Sano insists it's his duty as his assistant to rescue him. He kills a couple more gang members before handing Ryosuke a pistol with which to cover him. Much to his amazement, he finds it within himself to shoot a man with a rifle and then Takimoto (who has apparently murdered his entire family and gone on the run).

They think they're clear when Muraoka tries to run them down in a speeding car. Although he crashes, he manages to surprise Sano and holds a gun to his head, while warning Ryosuke that he's destined for hell. Sano wriggles free and Ryosuke shoots Muraoka, hoping that he can return to normal. Leaving the warehouse, Sano gives Ryosuke his hard drive, so he can relaunch his business. At that moment Akiko shows up with a gun behind her back. She asks her boyfriend for his credit cards and points the weapon at him, only for Sano to pick her off. He makes a call to some friends to clean the site (which suggests he's got yakuza connections). Driving away, he tells Ryosuke to focus on making money and leaving the dirty work to him. Realising he's in a Faustian bind, Ryosuke laments that he really is hellbound, as the sky darkens around him.

On his day, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a fine film-maker. But he can be inconsistent and this meandering melodrama never quite seems to know where it's heading or what it's trying to say. By virtue of his profession, Ryosuke Yoshii is a problematic protagonist. But Masaki Suda plays him with so little external emotion that he remains inscrutably impossible to read and resistibly difficult to root for, even when just about everyone lined up against him is devoid of redeemable features.

The likes of Takimoto and Muraoka are so thinly sketched that their treacherous villainy feels as contrived as Sano's ice-cool resourcefulness. As for Akiko, her materialism and shallowness smacks of misogyny, even though she's well played in the time-honoured femme fatale manner by Kotone Furukawa. Daiken Okudaira also impresses as Sano, who feels variously like a guardian angel and a damning demon, as he steers Ryosuke out of one crisis and plunges him into another.

Draping them all in sinister shadows, cinematographer Yasuyuki Sasaki sharply contrasts the cramped flat, spacious house, and cavernous mill, while also making the woodland feel ominously claustrophobic. Koichi Takahashi's editing is equally slick, while Takuma Watanabe contributes a propulsive score. Of course, Kurosawa directs with dynamism and precision, while his screenplay drolly satirises the world of online commerce, the corrupting nature of capitalism, and the power of the Internet (with its anonymity and mob mentality) to divest people of their scruples and turn them into unethical monsters. But, while this rattles along provocatively enough, it's not his best by some way.

WHERE DRAGONS LIVE.

For historians, Cumnor Place will always be associated with the suspicious death of Amy Robsart. She was married to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Rumours persisted that Amy had not fallen downstairs accidentally while the majority of the staff were attending Abingdon Fair on 6 September 1560. The ensuing scandal did for Dudley at court and stories later spread that his wife's ghost had appeared 28 years later to foretell the date of his own death.

Cumnor Place was demolished in 1810, but the legend continued that the local pond never froze because Amy's restless spirit had been driven into it by exorcists. No one has ever made a film about this Tudor murder mystery. But, now, the Cumnor Place built in 1909 near the original manor site by Amy and Katherine Jervois, comes to the screen in Suzanne Raes's Where Dragons Live, a documentary about the Impey family, who acquired the property in 1967 after seeing it advertised (in a state of considerable disrepair) in Country Life. They paid with the money raised by the sale of Rogier van der Weyden's postcard-sized painting, `Saint George and the Dragon' (c.1432-35).

Raes had come to know Harriet Impey in 2012, while promoting The Successor of Kakiemon, a study of Japanese porcelain that touched upon their shared interest in dragons. They had discussed making a film about the depiction of dragons in cultures across the world. But, following the death of Harriet's mother in 2021, they decided to record the process of her and older brothers, Edward, Lawrence, and Matthew, sorting through the belongings of their parents, author and antiquarian Oliver Impey and neuroscientist and academic Jane Impey (née Mellanby), prior to putting the house on the market.

Harriet has come with her son, Quentin, from her marriage to Dutch Japanese art expert, Menno Fitski. Knowing nothing about death duties, young cousin Lily thinks it's unfair that they have to sell Cumnor Place, even though she agrees that grandma wasn't particularly good with children. In the kitchen, Harriet jokes about everything being tagged with warning labels that her mother put on everything to ensure that things were always to her liking.

She recalls how her parents renovated the house by themselves and she is amazed by the amount of stuff they accumulated over four decades. Matthew arrives to clean gutters and fetch items down from the attic. He has followed his mother into science and admits being closer to her than his father, as she disliked leisure and always needed something to do. She even lectured days after giving birth and refused to allow having a family to disrupt her career at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

The venture into the garden and agree that an avenue of trees was terrifying in the dark. As she was so much younger than her brothers and spent a lot of her childhood in bed with an autoimmune disease, Harriet played by herself and became fascinated and frightened of dragons and monsters. Matthew convinced her that red algae on the swimming pool was dragon's blood and they concur that the house is full of odd creaks and shadows that can't always be explained.

Finding his grandfather's old desk, Matthew muses that he never saw him doing anything. But Harriet shows her children mementoes from his world tour and paints him as a dashing adventurer and very much a man of his times. A Mertonian who became Keeper of Japanese Art at the Ashmolean Musuem, her father also travelled widely and always sent her dragon postcards. As Matthew stands by the newly carved joint headstone (which is situated in a kink in the church wall where it abuts Cumnor Place so that Oliver could be buried in his preferred place), Matthew reveals that his father had once asked a Japanese fortune teller to predict his son's future. But he never told him what had been said.

Edward arrives to start a bonfire in the garden, as Harriet shows Quentin some of her father's dragon-coveed porcelain. He had been a zoologist before becoming an art historian and she had inherited his passion and had always hoped that somehow dragons had been real. Lawrence also descends and remembers `the Battle of the Nuttery', when he and Edward had driven some village boys out of the garden because Oliver was a bit of an isolationist and didn't allow his sons to fraternise.

As she finds boxes of slides showing the kids playing in the snow, Matthew confides in Harriet that his brothers had bullied him and once accidentally knocked him cold. They find a piece of paper on which Oliver had made up Latin names for a dragon story and we see old photos of the boys playing knights, as Edward reads to the assembled children from Beowulf. Relishing the fantasy world they had enjoyed, they return to mundanities like the jars of jam left in the larder.

Recognising that she got on better with her father than her brothers, Harriet is dismayed by the pressure placed on the boys to succeed academically. Oliver was harsh on Edward for being slow to pick up reading, but he went on to write novels at seven. Matthew concedes to having been a nerd with a rock collection, as we see Lawrence fix the tractor to mow the vast lawn. Each has found a niche, with Harriet becoming an artist. She sketched chickens in the garden and recalls her parents insisting on them noticing details in the world around them. In retrospect. she suggests that less observation and a little more affection might have been better for all the siblings.

The brothers are finding it hard to throw things away, while Harriet admonishes her parents for leaving them so much rubbish to sort through. Living abroad, Matthew fears losing his base in England and he admits to not really enjoying the task at hand. By contrast, Lawrence is keen to keep every lock and roll of sticky tape because you never know when they might come in handy. For Harriet, the past creeps up on her everywhere in the house and she doesn't feel so attached, as she was so limited in her movements from the age of 11. Yet, even she, finds things she just can't throw away and becomes tearful.

Harriet supervises the children as they make a dragon costume and sing a song from one of her childhood Dragon Nights. They watch home movies of a performance and Edward curses being forced to act in them and recite adult jokes penned by their father. As they watch, they still can't decide whether the footage represents glorious nostalgia or repressed trauma. Still frustrated at not being sent to the Dragon School in Oxford, Harriet wonders whether she loved her nanny more than her mother. She admits to being spooked by the change in the echo as the rooms are cleared, but insists she's less bothered by the places that used to scare her than she is by the fact that they will all leave the house forever without important things being said.

Lawrence is the one to label Jane as the dragon and Harriet reveals that they were all scared of her. She refused to brook emotions (with the exception of anger) and all the siblings admit to finding it difficult to open up. Assessors come to survey the more valuable pieces of furniture and porcelain over a passage from Beowulf describing treasure stashes and dead dragons. Joining Matthew in the garden for a farewell to the fairy ring on the lawn, Harriet reads from a letter that her mother seems to have written before her husband's death at the age of 69 in 2005. She thanks him for letting her pursue the career that meant so much to her and for putting up with her foibles. But she also remarks on the joy she has felt in seeing facets of him in their wonderful children. As Harriet closes the door for the final time, it would appear that this is the most precious discovery of the entire exercise.

Listing the Impeys with their children at the start of the credits, Raes bids farewell to Edward (Elizabeth and Frances), Lawrence (Cicely, Orlando, Rory, Ella, and Iona), Matthew (Ludo and Lily), and Harriet (Quentin and Evelyn). But she can't resist sending Harriet through the empty rooms and corridors with a large dragon mask on her head for a final nod towards their draconic connection - just in case we missed any of the earlier ones. In truth, this angle is rather overdone and the documentary is more revealing about the siblings and their parents when they talk about them with simple honesty.

Anyone who has had to clear out a parental home will verify the mix of anguish and exhilaration felt by the Impeys, as familial and individual memories come flooding back. But viewers may sometimes feel they are intruding upon private grief and Raes might have tempered this sense of interloping by making the house (with its 47 roof slopes and 18 chimneys) more of a character in itself rather than merely a remote repository of remembrances, regrets, and recriminations.

Whether capturing sunshine in the garden or shadow indoors, cinematographer Victor Horstink does a splendid job of capturing the ambience of Cumnor Place. A few too many scenes feel stage-managed, particularly where the younger children are concerned. Yet they often speak with a frankness their privileged parents have forgotten, as they watch them dealing with emotions and reminiscences that they have never really processed. Too many modern actualities make a virtue of the performative laundering of pent-up feelings. The experienced Raes gets the balance just about right, although we learn next to nothing about the Impey siblings away from Cumnor. But, ultimately, two such remarkable people as Oliver and Jane remain strangers and it's never entirely clear whether that's how their offspring view them or whether Raes was too distracted by the chaotic physical and psychological clutter around her to delve more deeply.