The Secret of Moonacre

TWO YEARS ago, Gabor Csupo took Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia, a book in which a child encountered magic realms at the bottom of the garden, and turned it into a profoundly moving, beautifully performed family film.

Now the same director has attempted to repeat the trick with Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse– in which another child encounters magic realms beyond the tool shed – but evil pixies or malevolent elves appear to have cast a terrible curse on the production.

Don gilded helm and gleaming mail, brave reader. Plum sapphire pools and traverse verdant valleys. Nowhere will ye find a magic- lantern show so fouled by the evil compromises of the multinational co-production. (They talk like that in these things.) The disorderliness of the enterprise is apparent from the start.

Following an incomprehensible prologue in which the portly Tim Curry carries out some sort of satanic rite amid inexpensively rendered virtual scenery, we join an orphaned Dakota Blue Richards, star of the ill-fated Golden Compass, as she travels from (ahem) London to her grumpy uncle's pile in the countryside.

You may not spot Saint Stephen’s Basilica, tallest building in Budapest, looming on the (ahem) London skyline, but you will surely notice how oddly middle-European the streets appear and remark that the west country looks awfully, well, eastern.

Indeed, everything in this well- meaning film feels ever so slightly awry. The plot is played out in a series of long, indifferently post- synched conversations that rapidly take on the quality of footnotes to a book you don’t much want to read. Ioan Gruffudd, playing the uncle, never manages to shake himself properly awake, and Natascha McElhone, as some sort of princess, appears to be encountering her lines for the first time.

Beatrix Aruna Pasztor’s fabulous costumes – Vivienne Westwood gone even more barmy – are, it must be said, a sight to behold, but the very fact that they attract the attention suggests that the rest of the film is not pulling its weight. Leave well alone.