Allelujah, review

A moving love letter to the NHS set in a world of death and incontinence.

Allelujah, Alan Bennett's 2018 play about the ailing fortunes of a geriatric hospital, gets a tonally bizarre big screen adaptation courtesy of Call The Midwife creator Heidi Thomas and director Richard Eyre. A slew of beloved British stage and screen stars - among them Judi Dench and Derek Jacobi - play the hospital's ailing patients, while Jennifer Saunders (as a ward nurse), Russell Tovey (as a government management consultant) and Bally Gill (as an immigrant doctor) attend to the plot, which revolves around the cash-strapped hospital's viability. Tovey gets a couple of good scenes, but a last-minute swerve into The Good Nurse territory doesn't come off at all.