The Secret Garden, review: get your family to the cinema for a sparkling Covid antidote

Dir: Marc Munden; Starring: Dixie Egerickx, Colin Firth, Julie Walters, Edan Hayhurst, Amir Wilson,  Isis Davis. PG cert, 100 mins.

You may have noticed that the phrase “the film we need right now” is being thrown around by critics these days on a near-weekly basis. Why? Well, for one thing, we currently need a lot more films than usual: it’s not as if the world is overflowing with alternative leisure-time activities. But what has also become clear during our planet’s present coronaviral predicament is that certain stories – sometimes even familiar ones – have felt surprisingly more urgent and potent.

What I’m saying is there’s value in the old cliché still, and The Secret Garden may be the best excuse yet to re-air it. Back in 2019, Marc Munden’s film would have been received as, well, exactly what it is: a handsome, well-acted, elegantly written adaptation of the classic children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. But in a year in which the world’s natural, everyday pleasures have often been walled-off and remote, it can’t help but feel like the family film of the moment.

And thanks to Hollywood’s ostrich-like response to Covid, the moment has long been in dire need of one. In what is fast becoming standard pandemic operating procedure, The Secret Garden is being released simultaneously in cinemas and on the Sky Cinema home entertainment platform. But don’t underestimate the additional, spirit-lifting cathartic oomph that comes with watching it outside of the house.

That is, after all, where Mary Lennox, who’s played by the terrifically talented 14-year-old British actress Dixie Egerickx, longs to be. When the film begins, Burnett’s forthright young heroine is living something of a 28-Days-Later-like existence, surviving on sugar cubes and cold, stagnant tea in her parents’ deserted colonial abode. It’s 1947 in Partition-era British India, and her mother and father are, fairly ominously, nowhere to be seen. Discovered by soldiers, she’s shipped off to Misselthwaite Manor, her uncle’s mansion on Yorkshire’s fog-enfolded moors, and a new life of indefinite loneliness and confinement. The closest thing she has to friends are Mrs Medlock (Julie Walters), the snippy housekeeper, and Martha (Isis Davis), her no-nonsense maid, while Lord Craven himself (Colin Firth) creaks and skulks at a lugubrious remove.

“I’m not a child,” Mary amusingly snaps at Mrs Medlock during her orientation tour – yet Munden’s film knows how to treat its viewers like children in all the best ways. Cinematographer Lol Crawley’s camera often hovers warily at a 10-year-old’s eye level, intimately tying our perspective as an audience to Mary’s own, while Jack Thorne’s crisp, supple screenplay allows us to discover the plot scene by scene, just as Mary keeps happening on revealing new nooks and pockets as she explores Misselthwaite’s corridors and grounds.

One of these contains her sickly cousin Colin (Edan Hayhurst), while another is of course the garden itself – here re-imagined as a Harry Potter-like enchanted hollow that seems to hold more than its four walls could possibly enclose, and where the undergrowth rustles and sways of its own accord. Even Misselthwaite Manor, with its secret passageways and elaborate, vine-tangled murals, has a certain Hogwarts quality: Mundel’s film offers a more heightened version of Burnett’s novel than the classic MGM rendition from 1949, or the 1993 version directed by Agnieszka Holland. The abundance of computer graphics, benign ghosts and a very gothic new climax may rankle FHB purists. (The production company is Heyday Films, whose portfolio also includes the Potter and Paddington films.)

But then the story here comes to us pre-refracted through Mary’s own imagination, so the true extent of its fantastical nature is ours to unpick. But on screen, even her clothes get in on the fun: her butterfly-print dress attracts real butterflies, while her blue coat becomes embroidered with clumps of green thread after she tumbles down a mossy embankment.

“How is it that we’re taught by our children?” Firth wonders aloud at one point: a lovely line by Thorne that not only encapsulates the plot’s own transition from wintry grief to the green shoots of renewal, but its extraordinary capacity in a time of curfews and containment to move, delight and reinvigorate us all – young and old alike.

The Secret Garden opens in cinemas and is available on Sky Home Cinema from Friday