A British romantic comedy written and co-directed by Ate de Jong, the Dutch film-maker behind cult children’s comedy Drop Dead Fred? I’m interested. Sadly, Love Is Thicker Than Water is nowhere near as gleefully wacky nor as playfully anarchic as de Jong’s 1991 film. He’s a Welsh, working-class bike courier; she’s a dairy-free cellist with her own flat, courtesy of her posh Jewish family. They fall in love, move in, and, unsurprisingly, find it difficult to integrate into each other’s radically different families. It feels like two films stitched together; one half is an affected, desperately quaint love story, the other a darker, more interesting look at sudden loss as experienced in one’s 20s. The leads, Johnny Flynn (best known as the lead in Netflix show Lovesick) and Lydia Wilson (Star Trek: Beyond) have chemistry, and I’m not one to bat away an attempt to revive a genre that was once a stalwart of the British film industry, but ultimately, the stakes of their relationship are too low to create any real dramatic fizz.
