After more than a dozen big screen adaptations, easily making it the most viewer-friendly of all Charles Dickens’s literary works, there still appears to be some mileage in A Christmas Carol.
There have been sombre dramas, a musical, an opera, a dance suite, a Bollywood makeover, a Bill Murray comedy and Muppets, and now director Ti West tells the tale by leaning into his background in horror.
Not that Ebenezer is a full-on frightener, you understand, but the 12A certificate is an indication that it isn’t wholesomely festive fun for all the family.
On the surface, it stays true to the source material, recreating a smoky and seedy Victorian London populated by the haves of the title character and his relatives, and the have-nots of his employee Bob Cratchit and sundry beggars and blaggards.
However, once Ebenezer Scrooge is awoken in the dead of night by ghostly visitors, events take a ghoulishly macabre turn that’s arguably less Dickens and more Edgar Allan Poe.
At the centre of it all is Johnny Depp as the title character, in his first major Hollywood outing for several years, suitably bereft of seasonal cheer and shouting “humbug!” at anyone within ear shot.
We’re introduced to him on Christmas Eve, sat at a desk across from his partner Jacob Marley (Ian McKellen) moments before he drops dead on the hardwood floor; then the action jumps forward seven years (the original publication date of A Christmas Carol), and the curmudgeon cavalcade begins in earnest.
His take on Scrooge is largely a hybrid of Alistair Sim in 1951, Albert Finney in ’70 and Michael Caine in ’92, but it’s mostly scowling with very little substance, a portrayal that strays perilously close to pantomime and at odds with the seriousness of his plight.
It doesn’t help that in scenes requiring him to wear a dark-coloured nightcap he resembles an especially annoyed nun.
Depp is the unfortunate weak link whose exaggerated facial expressions are a poor fit for the spine-chilling sequences dominated by memorably vivid spirits, starting with the return of Marley menacingly lugging his chains behind him and smashing through flimsy doors and walls.
Andrea Riseborough ups the stakes as the Ghost of Christmas Past, a glowing white spectre with an unsettling monotone voice and pupilless eyes that are almost scary enough to raise the film’s 12A to a 15.
She conveys a disturbing sense of a woman long detached from the mortal world for whom the spooking of Scrooge is just another day at the office, a subliminal suggestion that nothing’s left after death comes a-knocking.
More gruesomely, Tramell Tillman is monstrously good value as the Ghost of Christmas Present; a portly rageaholic with a face covered in bubbling blemishes, whose grubby coat (temporarily) hides the source of despairing screams emanating from within his ribcage.
Apart from Riseborough or Tillman, the film is pretty much standard fare in dramatic terms, with little asked of other supporting players like Rupert Grint (the movie world’s most baby-faced thirty-something) as Cratchit, or Ellie Bamber and Daisy Ridley as strait-laced young Victorian ladies.
Screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern deserves credit for dialogue that often stays true to the Dickens text, as opposed to previous adaptations where the author’s poetic command of language was frequently the first thing to go.
Visually, it’s stunning; cinematographer Checco Varese and production designer Eve Stewart conjure up a richly atmospheric portrait of a decaying London that chimes with the reportage and social commentary for which Dickens was rightly celebrated across his entire body of writing; it’s their work that is most likely to find favour when awards season comes around.
There’s a great deal to enjoy in Ebenezer, but it’s a frustrating watch, due mainly to an over-egged central performance that all too often gets in the way of an audience’s suspension of disbelief; we’re constantly reminded we’re only watching Johnny Depp, and not at his best.
Ebenezer is released in UK cinemas on Friday 13 November.
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