The always engaging Sheila Hancock gives a nice performance here, but I felt that this well-meaning film basically retreads the old ideas about the old person who in death’s encroaching shadow has one last glorious life-affirming adventure – in the odd-couple company of a much younger person who after being grumpy/baffled naturally grows to love the oldster and learns a lot from them about living life to the full.
Edie (Hancock) is someone who has sacrificed a vast amount of her life to being a dutiful child and then a dutiful carer/wife. In her grim widowhood, she finds that her alienated and embittered daughter has plans to put her in a care home. So, emboldened by memories from a recently discovered postcard of Mount Suilven in the Scottish Highlands, she heads off to wildly beautiful Inverness, where she rashly plans to go hiking and camping. Local lad Jonny (Kevin Guthrie) offers to be her guide, at an extortionate cash rate, money he needs to boost the camp store business he’s setting up with his girlfriend. But soon he grows to like this cantankerous, difficult, vulnerable woman and grows ashamed of his attempts to milk her for money. He has a kind of ersatz grandsonmance with Edie.
We get some lovely photography of the Highlands and the breathtaking landscapes all around Inverness, and Hancock is always a potent presence. But she could have done more, conveyed more, with a story that wasn’t so basically simplistic and familiar.
• This article was amended on 25 May 2018 to remove the word Mount from the name of Suilven; the suffix ‘ven’ is derived from the Scottish Gaelic ‘bheinn’, which means mountain.
