Pathé UK
MOVIE REVIEW
Allelujah (2022)
“Allelujah” is the worst of both worlds: It’s a pro-socialized-healthcare polemic that manages to condemn publicly funded medicine; and it’s an expertly made piece of racist trash. It beggars belief how writer Alan Bennett (a beloved British institution, who has been at the heart of the light-comedy scene through his diaries and plays for more than 60 years) and director Richard Eyre, who got a knighthood for his services to drama nearly a quarter-century ago, got it so wrong. And it’s not just that what they meant as a love letter for the National Health Service turned into a rallying cry for its own destruction. It’s that perhaps, in service to drama, they chose to make a movie that can’t tell the difference between mother’s milk and morphine.