Dir. Gabor Csupo, Hungary/ UK/ France, 2008, 103 mins
Cast: Ioan Gruffudd, Natascha McElhone, Dakota Blue Richards, Juliet Stevenson
Review by Carol Allen
Despite a good cast and a promising fantasy plot, this tale of a Victorian orphan, who is the only hope of lifting the curse from a magic kingdom and saving her family, lacks the necessary magic. In fact, it plods where it should fly.
When her father dies leaving her destitute, 13-year-old Maria Merryweather (Richards) and her loyal governess Miss Heliotrope (Stevenson) are sent to live with grumpy and reclusive Uncle Benjamin (Gruffudd) in his remote and crumbling castle/mansion. Being a curious child, as they usually are in such stories, Maria soon discovers there is a curse on the Merryweather family due to a long-standing feud between them and the de Noir clan over the magic moon pearls owned by the Moon Princess (McElhone), who centuries ago was betrothed to Maria's ancestor Sir Wrolf (also Gruffudd). If the pearls are not returned to their rightful owner before the 5,000th moon rises, which is soon, disaster will strike. In the course of her quest Maria discovers history has repeated itself, when she is befriended by Uncle Benjamin's former fiancée Loveday, who is a de Noir and is also played by McElhone. She also falls foul of Loveday's villainous father Coeur de Noir (Tim Curry) and his clan, who live in the surrounding forest and includes his rather cute son Robin (Augustus Prew), who for some reason favours eye-liner and a bowler hat in a style statement reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange .
Despite some imaginative special effects, as in the book telling the story of the two families, which comes to life when Maria starts to read it, Csupo fails to transport us convincingly into this other world, whose inhabitants also include a somewhat unsubstantial unicorn and a distinctly scruffy-looking lion, who takes on the guise of a fierce dog and is Maria's protector. Some amusing moments are provided by Andy Linden as uncle's midget chef, who demonstrates an interesting power of locomotion and who alerts Maria to her destiny. Stevenson does her best with a role which requires her to do little more than flap around rather irritatingly like a mother hen — she and Richards had a far more effective on-screen relationship in the recent television drama Dustbin Baby as foster mother and daughter — and the rest of the cast acquit themselves with reasonable dignity. But the largely prosaic nature of the direction fails to persuade us to suspend our disbelief and get swept up into what should be a magical world.
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