Part noirish story about corruption and a missing person, part romantic comedy about a buttoned-up Brit who discovers a sensual side in a southern clime (think Get Carter or Chinatown meets Shirley Valentine), It Snows in Benidorm is a whole paella of cliché and messy storytelling. A prawn in the paella is Timothy Spall, one of the film’s few redeeming features. He stars as Peter, a gentle soul from Manchester who suddenly gets laid off by the bank where he works.
He flies to Benidorm to stay with his brother Daniel whom he hasn’t seen for years, but Daniel fails to meet him at the airport. Turns out Daniel isn’t the guy Peter remembered. He has all sorts of side hustles on the go, including owning a burlesque club, a finger in land swindles by local gangsters, and a murky relationship with his club’s manager Alex (Sarita Choudhury).
As some of the mysteries are solved, Spanish writer-director Isabel Coixet keeps adding new ones: what is the point of all the references to Sylvia Plath, for example, and what’s with all the meteorological symbolism? (Peter is an amateur weather scientist.) Most baffling of all, does anyone really think there is an audience for this kind of mouldy whimsy? Coixet has a good eye for the town’s architectural surreality but she can’t write a good screenplay to save a life.
★★☆☆☆
In UK cinemas from September 2
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