23 Walks, review: come for Alison Steadman and later-life romance, stay for the cute dogs

• Dir: Paul Morrison. Cast: Alison Steadman, Dave Johns, Marsha Millar, Rakhee Thakrar. 12A cert, 102 mins

One positive thing to be said for 23 Walks is the first 13 walks are quite good. This wobbly British romance follows two retired dog owners who grow closer while exercising their pets, initially on a leafy pathway through their local north London park. Their names are Fern (Alison Steadman) and Dave (Dave Johns), and while this middle-class divorcée and retired mental-health nurse make for a gently incongruous couple, they’re peas in a pod compared to their pooches: Henry, a frisky Yorkshire terrier, and Tillie, a stoic Alsatian with dark, sad eyes.

For half an hour or so, the film plays very carefully by the rules it seems to have set itself: it’s essentially a two-hander (plus, to be fair, an eight-paw-er) comprising of nothing more than these transitory, ambulatory encounters, during which we observe the changing of the seasons while gleaning some telling details of Fern and Dave’s lives from their increasingly intimate chats.

They’re both always alone, not counting the dogs, but are each looking for support during a particularly trying chapter of their lives, and possibly companionship that will outlast it. But having established this intimate, engaging scenario, writer-director Paul Morrison makes the mistake of zooming right out from it, and the film becomes a deeply unremarkable romantic drama about a midlife courtship, with a canine angle that comes and goes.

Both Fern, a middle-class divorcée and one-time Tiller Girl, and Dave, a retired mental health nurse, are given one source of ongoing worry – a surly ex-husband and unpaid rent, respectively – plus one further, far more private secret, both of which come to light schematically, in order to give the plot’s waning momentum another nudge. (Most of 23 Walks’ problems seem to stem from its slog towards feature length: its premise would have almost certainly worked better as a short.)

Steadman and Johns are both gifted performers who invest as much feeling as they can in the often thin material, though Dave’s rent woes are a transparently shameless attempt to recapture some of his more gruelling moments in I, Daniel Blake, while Steadman’s considerable comedic prowess goes almost embarrassingly untapped. Time and again, the film corrals their characters into situations it lacks the emotional delicacy to get them through unscathed – not least a weirdly frenzied sex scene which begins with so much off-screen grunting and puffing I assumed it must be the set-up to a joke, and the camera was about to pan across to the pair shifting furniture.

“Beats the night shift at Kings Cross with the self-harmers,” Dave quips – not post-coitally, to be clear, but after Fern reminisces about her long-ago stint at the London Palladium, during which she fraternised with the stars of the day, and once even “had Bajan chicken with Cliff Richard”. (These should be funny lines, particularly from Johns and Steadman, yet they aren’t.) Judged on a similar scale, 23 Walks just about passes muster, but it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, all told.

23 Walks is released in UK cinemas from Friday September 25