From Time to Time

1944, the last year of the war. Tolly's father is missing at the front. The boy is sent to spend Christmas with his grandmother in an old house in the country. The house is very old and the grandmother speaks strangely about it. One night Tolly sees somebody in the corridor. Then another child, then a whole household. The people who lived there in 1805 are still present and Tolly can see them. A blind girl, a groom and a story about a fire. The past has a matter left unsettled and the boy walks into it. Julian Fellowes wrote and directed, adapting the script from a novel by Lucy M. Boston. Maggie Smith, Timothy Spall, Hugh Bonneville and Alex Etel are in the cast. It is a British production. The narrative holds two times in one place; the house does not change, the people in it do. The matter it treats is loss; the boy's father is missing and somebody in the house's past is lost as well. The film brings the history of slavery directly into the story and leaves it more open than a children's film usually would. The ghost element is not used for fright; what appears is not a threat. Fellowes worked for a long time as a screenwriter; this is one of his few films as a director. The narrative keeps rural England and the shortages of the war year in the background. The ending closes both times together. The narrative moves slowly and builds no suspense. Its limit is pace; it is slow, the acting is at television scale, and it is too still for a young audience. Who it is for: viewers who like British period pieces and gentle ghost stories. Who it is not for: it is slow, low on tension, and the ending sad.