Allelujah
Allelujah is a completely baffling exercise; blowing up an otherwise poorly constructed and disinteresting light ensemble comedy set amidst a geriatric ward by veering hard into serial killer territory, before breaking the fourth wall in a dumbfounding piece of propaganda.
Sister Gilpin (Jennifer Saunders) and Dr Valentine (Bally Gill) are the two pinnacles of care at a small Yorkshire geriatric ward that has been marked by a penny-pinching government for closure and consolidation. When Joe Colman (David Bradley) is admitted, his son Colin (Russell Tovey) makes the journey up from London to visit him. His day job is as a consultant to the Government, pushing the agenda of combining small medical facilities into big uncaring hospitals, amidst an overwhelming demand for beds. When he gets to this facility though, the patients, his father, Sister Gilpin and Dr Valentine might just make him change his mind.
Allelujah is the sort of movie that leaves your jaw firmly on the floor at the end of its 1 hour and 39 minute runtime (that feels like 6 hours).
The film kicks off as a soppy, meandering and done before beatific drama/comedy about the closure of a local hospice. It’s as on the nose as humanly possible (or so we think), with long conversations about the state of the health system between a conveniently placed Government consultant and the angelically named doctor of the piece, long monologues on the almost deity-tier importance of beds, or muddled group singing.
The jokes are non-existent; everything meant to be funny is completely missing its mark. Judi Dench hides in a corner, her talents confined to wandering aimlessly about with an iPad she has just learnt how to film with, obsessed with filming things in the ‘margins’ of life - or more accurately, filming almost exclusively the bed frames, blank parts of the ceiling, and her own shoes in some art nouveau experiment until the plot calls for her to miraculously capture a critical interaction between Sister Gilpin and Joe Colman, completely ‘hidden’ but at an impossible angle
Every single person in this film is absolutely going through the motions, and for the most part that would be fine. The first third thematically (although more like 80% timewise) of the film is like a more sad, less fun and less funny Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, but with no plot and set amongst a group of dying people with incontinence issues. There are some nice scenes in the garden between Bradley and Tovey, but for the most part this screams “why am I on a cinema screen and not buried on a free to air TV channel”.
Then, disaster strikes. The aforementioned footage from Dench’s character is revealed, and so too the shocking secret of this film that transforms what was a completely boring but perfectly fine piece of melodrama into a serial killer thriller film. The sheer shock of this moment is almost too much to comprehend, because it comes SO FAR out of left field.
In the final coup-de-grace, the movie jails its main hero, after doing nothing to set up her demise, and skips ahead to the COVID era where Dr Valentine - now in full PPE - breaks the fourth wall to lecture the audience with some NHS propaganda, focussed heavily on the job our nurses do and how important it is. It’s whiplash in full effect - muddling along at a snails pace for most of the movie, before condemning nurses and then deifying them in nearly the same breath. It’s also incredibly late to the party, delving into a topic we’ve seen delivered better closer to the pandemic era and with more pathos. Most egregiously, it comes off as incredibly patronizing and pandering, and squanders any good will this movie had built for its seeming cause of promoting localized, person-centric care.
