The One and Only

Suzanne Bier's highly regarded Danish comedy Den Eneste Ene is relocated to England. Put simply, it doesn't compute. The boy meets girl complications play like an empty routine: kitchen fitter Neil (Roxburgh) is left to look after an adopted five-year-old from Burkina Faso when he loses his wife in a car crash; across town Stevie (Waddell) is already pregnant by her Italian footballer husband (Cake) when she discovers his infidelity. No prizes for guessing where this is going, but progress is painful. There's a dichotomy, for instance, between the shiny contemporary settings in resurgent Newcastle and the passé attempt to wring humour from funny foreign types. If a tenet of successful screen comedy is making it look effortless, the cast labour with the overwrought dialogue as if juggling breeze blocks, while the showy direction goes for naught.