12 in a Box

Such is the intricate craftsmanship of this delicate 2007 British indie that it’s taken six years to ready it for cinemas… If only that were true: this is a desperately old-fashioned, cack-handed country-house farce, only being released now as it features an intermittent ‘star’ turn from TV comic and actress Miranda Hart (hardly a casting coup to get the pulse racing, especially as she spends most of the film tied up in another room). The plot would embarrass matinee audiences in the most creaky of regional amateur theatres: 12 mismatched folk are lured to a country house on the pretence of a school reunion and must remain there for four days to win £1 million each. There are arguments, infidelities, grievances and dropped trousers. There are crooks, policemen, bodies and breasts. The acting is uniformly Z-grade. Didn’t playwright Joe Orton banish this sort of stuff to the grave in the late 1960s?