Run time: 95 mins

This eccentric Scottish dramedy hangs on Peter Mullan’s commanding central performance, balancing humour with a strong emotional undercurrent.

In the fictional town of Aberloch, Kenneth (Mullan) is a weary local historian and widower fixated on his controversial ancestor Sir Douglas Weatherford, an 18th-century landowner whose reputation blends Enlightenment thought with deeply dubious morality. Kenneth clings to this legacy with uncomfortable enthusiasm, dressing in period costume to lecture bemused tourists about a figure he reveres more than the town around him. When a low-budget fantasy television production arrives in the area, the local heritage centre swiftly pivots towards the show’s popularity, sidelining Kenneth’s carefully curated exhibits and pushing him into unwanted new roles tied to the production.

Director Sean Robert Dunn’s debut leans into character-driven humour and small-town absurdity, but it is Mullan who anchors everything, shaping Kenneth into a man both prickly and unexpectedly vulnerable. His frustrations never tip into caricature, instead revealing someone struggling to reconcile pride, loss and irrelevance.

There are hints of sharper satire in the opening passages, particularly around the figure of Sir Douglas himself, but the film gradually settles into a warmer, more melancholic register as Kenneth’s story takes hold, resulting in a modest but affecting character study.