Ebenezer review: Johnny Depp still has the terrible English accent he’s been torturing for 30 years

Ebenezer

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Director: Ti West

Cert: 12A

Starring: Johnny Depp, Rupert Grint, Andrea Riseborough, Sam Claflin, Daisy Ridley, Tramell Tillman, Ian McKellen

Running Time: 1 hr 55 mins

“Marley was dead: to begin with.”

Not here, he ain’t. Ti West’s not entirely unworthy riff on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol starts with Jacob Marley, in the deliciously seedy form of Ian McKellen, still bickering with Ebenezer Scrooge, manifested less satisfactorily as Johnny Depp, in the 19th-century financial institution that bears their name.

“The name you know, the story you don’t,” the poster blares. Given that the Ghost of Christmas Past has been outlining Scrooge’s back story for 180 years, that always seemed unlikely, but West’s deviation from the famous first line maybe promises some unexplored narrative space.

That is not how it works out. Within minutes of us being introduced to the two partners, Marley is, indeed, dead and we have been thrown into yet another faithful adaptation of an indestructible text. There are a few new twists, but Ebenezer is no less respectful than was Brian Desmond Hurst’s film Scrooge, featuring Alastair Sim, from 1951.

Unsurprisingly from the director of the X trilogy, the most conspicuous shift in style is towards 1970s British horror. The bold red opening credits remind us of those on anthology shockers such as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors. Ignorance and Want are seen writhing within the revealed rib cage of Christmas Present (Tramell Tillman).

If Andrea Riseborough appears in a film she is invariably the best thing, and Ebenezer offers no exception; the Geordie is genuinely unsettling as a dead-eyed Christmas Past with a voice like dry leaves. All of this is in keeping with a source that is more macabre than most adaptations allow.

And Depp? I regret to tell you he returns from semi-exile with the same terrible English accent he has been torturing for 30 years: consonants hammered and vowels strangled. One can scarcely imagine a more foolish error than positioning him beside McKellen in that opening sequence. There is an actor born to the role.

Depp, in virtually every scene, doesn’t exactly kill the thing, but you sense a much better film longing to escape his awkward embrace. Still, it remains good enough (which is not very) to pop up every Christmas until long after all of us have set to rattling our own chains in the icy limbo.

Watchable, but definitely not for the littlest kids.

In cinemas from Friday, November 13th