Paul Morrison’s rom-dram doesn’t quite have the courage of its title convictions to etch a late-in-life relationship solely through 23 dog walks, ending up at around nine (the first walk is captioned #1, which creates the worrying expectation we have another 22 to sit through). Instead, the result is a nicely played but slowly paced and ultimately slightly dull drama.
Dave Johns is Dave, a retired mental health worker whose wife died a few years ago. Alison Steadman is Fern, a former Tiller Girl at the London Palladium whose husband left her for a younger woman. The pair meet cute on Hampstead Heath — she owns a Yorkshire Terrier named Harry, he owns Tilly, a German Shepherd — and in classic romcom style start bickering over Tilly not being on a lead. Gingerly, the pair get to know each other over awkward cups of tea, more walks (#9 sees a singing collab of Flanders and Swann’s ‘The Hippopotamus Song’ (“Mud, mud, glorious mud…”) and games of draughts, the couple finding common ground in loneliness and a love of their pets.
Johns is always a likeable, buoyant presence and Steadman does a good job of etching Fern’s reticence in taking things further (the film ultimately doesn’t shy from the realities of OAP love — there is a tastefully done sexagenarian sex scene), but the writing never rings true, even with the parameters the film sets itself: the story mines its dramas through characters withholding secrets (once is fine, any more is contrived), clumsily handled emotional crescendos and a tonally-off social-problems agenda parachuted in from a Ken Loach movie. The London greenery is pretty and the canines are cute, but both the actors and the target audience (and the dogs) deserve more.