THIS debut film for director Donald Rice and co-writer Mary Hanley-Magill adapts a novel by Julia Strachey.

In a medium-sized country manor in Devon on a summer day on 1932, Dolly (Felicity Jones) is dressing for marriage to Owen. Relatives are arriving. Old antagonisms are bubbling beneath the surface. Joseph (Luke Treadaway) is there uninvited. He and Dolly were an item before he went off anthropologising. Dolly’s domineering mother (Elizabeth McGovern) is determined that whatever may happen, it will be a great success.

The film mixes humour with acerbic evaluations of people, class structures, domestic relationships. The conflict is muted, subtle. Tensions build through revelations of family history. Characters demonstrate their idiosyncrasies and invite us to expect fireworks, including confetti-bombs made by a mischievous small boy.

While perhaps not great cinema, it’s enjoyable and invites hope for the futures of its tyro creators, who have cast a small collection of England’s middle-level acting talents of whom you will find yourself wondering, what’s that one’s name; where have I seen this one?

And the weather on the day is occasional showers.

At Palace Electric