All the Little Animals

Bobby, a young man with brain damage, leaves home to escape a stepfather who has killed his pets. On the roads of Cornwall he meets an old man called Mr Summers, who spends his time gathering animals killed by cars and burying them. Bobby finds a place for himself in that work and the two travel together. But the stepfather has not given up looking, and there is something in Summers's own past he has not told. The name behind the film is worth noting: Jeremy Thomas produced everything from The Last Emperor to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, and this is the only time he sat in the director's chair. It comes from Walker Hamilton's short novel. The relationship between John Hurt and a young Christian Bale is built less as a rescue than as two solitudes holding on to each other. The Cornish landscape is not picturesque but wet and empty.