Review: Sometimes Always Never

Scrabble and tailoring: this is most definitely a very English take on grief. Bill Nighy is Alan, a father who hasn't so much buried his grief over his missing-possibly-dead son as he's dropped it in an impeccably cut jacket pocket where his hand occasionally brushes up against it.

We meet him waiting on a windswept seaside foreshore passing the time by chatting happily to an extremely disinterested ice cream man. If Alan was played by just about anybody else, it'd feel like a parody of a certain kind of adrift English gentleman, and what follows would crumble in a heap.

Nighy brings two essential things to this occasionally twee but never sentimental film - heart and a tough of ruthlessness. The heart takes time to develop: the ruthlessness we see when he and his son Peter (Sam Reily) - who assumed they were going on a day trip but now finds himself staying the night in a antiquated hotel - encounter a man and wife also staying at the hotel.

Alan suggests a game of scrabble; Peter, still haunted by childhood memories of endlessly playing a shoddy off-brand version, goes to bed. He wakes the next morning to find that Alan hustled the husband out of two hundred pounds. Worse, it soon develops that they're all there for the same reason: to identify a body that's washed ashore.

What follows is charmingly unpredictable in the details, but always firmly anchored emotionally. Alan has never stopped searching for his other son, who stormed out of the house years ago over an argument over a word in Scrabble; when he finds an on-line player with the same style as his missing son, he grasps at hope like a drowning man.

He does this while staying with Peter and his wife Sue (Alice Lowe)  in a room he shares with their son Jack (Louis Healy), proving to be a good influence on Jack - especially when it comes to romance and tailoring (the title is a reference to which buttons should be done up on a three-button suit jacket) - even as Peter's frustrations with his father's inability to move on grow.

This has the slightly heightened realism of a slightly damp Wes Anderson film. It never becomes cloying or distracting, partly because Nighy is so good, party because the core of the story is a wound that can't be healed. This sweet, good-natured film is constantly surprising, often insightful, and sure-handed about grief in a way many flashier films can only aspire to. It's a gem.

- Anthony Morris