All the Little Animals Review

A young man with a childhood brain injury runs from a murderous stepfather and falls in with an old recluse who buries animals killed on the roads. Jeremy Thomas, who spent decades producing for Bertolucci and Cronenberg, directs here for the only time, and the inexperience shows in the pacing rather than the images. John Hurt is the one steady asset, playing Mr Summers with a matter of fact tenderness that keeps the burial ritual from turning twee.

Bale commits completely to Bobby and the physical work is careful, but the writing hands him almost nothing beyond a repeated childlike register that flattens badly across two hours. Daniel Benzali plays the stepfather as a snarling cartoon in a sharp suit, and every scene he enters slides into melodrama. The moorland photography is genuinely lovely, all wet granite and low cloud, which only sharpens the mismatch with a story that lurches between fable and thriller without committing to either.

By the time the film reaches the car chase around the docks and drops the stepfather down an open shaft, the moral scheme has gone so blunt that the ending plays as wish fulfilment. A gentler, stranger picture is visible underneath this one, and it never gets out.