I just got back from the cinema. I had initially headed there to watch Poor Things, having seen Mark Kermode’s review of it this morning and grown intrigued. However, it wasn’t going to begin for a couple of hours, so I thought I would check out Wonka instead. I had heard a lot about it, and it is a film I had been intending to watch for weeks. The simple fact that it purported to be a contemporary retelling of a classic children’s film from the sixties pricked my curiosity. However, now that I have seen it, I must say I find myself totally bemused: it is utterly bizarre, as if film as an artform has at last lost it’s mind completely and thrown any sense of reality out the window. 

I know that, as a kid’s film, you shouldn’t try to read too much into it; yet I’m at a complete loss to say what Wonka is actually about. By turns it can be read as a tribute to the original Charlie And The Chocolate Factory; an absurd psychedelic children’s romp involving policemen who were dressed as French gendarmes but spoke with thick New York accents; or an allegory for the mafia and illegal drugs cartels. Indeed, the film itself could even probably be read as some kind of drug trip, it was so full of bizarre iconography. Above all, as I trundled home for the cinema, the question bugging me the most was, how the zark did Hugh Grant get cast as an Oompa Loompa?!

It was an inane, absurd piece of post-classical American film attempting to cash in on the sixty year old original; yet, forgive me, but I couldn’t help liking it.