Benjamin Lee

In trying to scratch our itch for the old while also recognising the new, McKendrick settles for something stale.

For a slow – and often ponderously uneventful – film, the ending also feels strangely rushed, decisions and reveals not explored enough for them to really land in the way that’s clearly intended (there’s a potentially more satisfying psychological thriller using the same ingredients). There’s really impressive craft here though.

The romcom is a genre I will forever root for, despite it being stuck in a cruelly long flop era, and while Office Romance does have a tad more gloss than Netflix’s many junkier alternatives, the magic is still missing. Like the office at its centre, it’s too sleek and corporate to melt us – all work and no play

You can feel the struggle of trying to cram everything in and even at an unforgivably bloated 143 minutes, it’s both busy and hollow.

Its scope might be small but I found its emotional impact to be surprisingly big.

For a film so unashamedly silly, it’s also incredibly, tiresomely un-fun and, by the end, laughably earnest, as if we should all be learning a very important lesson.

The only mildly jolting sequence is the cold open, setting up a previous haunting with two friends, something the marketing team was clearly aware of, having essentially shown it in full in the first teaser trailer. It’s downhill from there, as we’re stuck with an anonymously written couple we struggle to root for as they face off with an antagonist we struggle to understand.

Ritchie is more deeply invested in the thought-through craft of making a B-movie than many of his peers and there’s a smooth sensuousness to how he moves, each of them looking, feeling and sounding like films he genuinely cares about.

Held together by Molina’s typically commanding voiceover, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a simple, heart-first drama of broken people trying to put themselves back together.

It all has the distinctly cheap whiff of something that should have gone direct to the small screen – hammy acting, stilted dialogue, chintzy effects, tinny score, Halloween costumes – but without the raucous fun that should come with it.