From John McPhail, the Glaswegian director behind cult favourite Anna and the Apocalypse, comes Grow, a delightfully daft and incredibly charming family film that follows Charlie (newcomer Priya-Rose Brookwell), a young girl with an almost supernatural instinct for horticulture on a mission to grow the world’s biggest pumpkin.
After some ravishingly autumnal animated opening credits, we are introduced to young pre-teen Charlie as a cheeky wee rapscallion trying to sneak on board a bus to the airport. After being caught, she is escorted home to Oakbrook, a home for abandoned children. Her foiled plan was to hop on board a plane to LA, where her mum (Kathryn Drysdale) had gone to chase her big Hollywood dreams three years prior. As fortune would have it, a relative has just been found for Charlie in the form of aunt Dinah Little (Golda Rusheuvel), a farmer with an attitude as big as the bills mounting on her desk. Dinah lives in the small but bustling fictional Scottish village of Mugford, where everyone knows everyone, your dating options are rather limited and the entire village is obsessed with pumpkins. The narrative follows Charlie as she attempts to break the world record for Heaviest Pumpkin, a feat which will earn her £100,000. This will be enough to get hotels, a flight to Hollywood, and pay for a private detective to find the mother that abandoned her.
Charlie’s first stumbling block is finding out how to grow a pumpkin. However, the pumpkin-obsessed residents of Mugford are less than helpful to her, while returning pumpkin growing champions, the wealthy Smythe-Gherkin’s (Tim McInnerney and Jane Horrocks going full ham), are so protective over their respective pumpkin growing secrets that they chase the young girl away with pitchforks for merely enquiring. With assistance from a yellow beanie wearing recluse Arlo (a highly affable Nick Frost), Charlie soon begins to grow a pumpkin that she names Peter.
Little do the community know that the young girl’s pumpkin rearing methods are not like the other village residents however. Charlie has the somewhat nondescript ability to communicate to plants. She has an empathetic green thumb, where by brushing her fingers against the various stems and leaves, she can feel exactly what the plant feels. This is often merely a case of thirst or wanting to be placed at a sunnier section of garden, but in a bout of scriptural whimsy, sometimes they’re bored and require entertainment in the form of pop music, or dancing the Macarena in front of them. One can imagine that the dance from star Brookwell shall provide much amusement to the TikTok children recreating it when they finish watching.
The central trifecta of conflict within Grow – part one and part two are our hero Charlie and the Smythe-Gherkins – is complete with Mr. Gregory (Jeremy Swift), a pumpkin-mad scientist whose crazy experiments result in a giant mutated pumpkin. It is a little odd to have this pseudo-mad scientist trope in a narrative that promotes fostering a healthy relationship with nature – it never quite makes the leap to be anti-science – but the world of Grow is a metaphorical snowglobe. The village, shot by cinematographer George Geddes to include luscious lawns and looming church steeples, wouldn’t look out of place as the setting for a Wallace and Gromit story. Indeed, the tale told by McPhail here is one quintessentially steeped in British reminiscence, to a fault. It is a microcosm of British traditionalism and isn’t wary of the outer world, which makes it a lovely piece of escapism in that way, even if its lack of discussion about the changing climate feels like a missed opportunity to promote empathy for nature without preaching. The closest Grow gets to this is a small beat within Dinah’s character arc, where she is inspired by Charlie (offscreen) to change to organic produce, removing the use of pesticides on her farm fields.
Making up the supporting cast is a cheery trickle of British talent; Joe Wilkinson is here a lazy, gameboy playing farmhand; Alan Carr appears as the host of Heaviest Pumpkin awards ceremony; Dominic McLaughlin, a newcomer who has recently been cast in HBO’s Harry Potter, plays the son of Swift’s Mr. Gregory; Sharon Rooney also appears briefly as a shop clerk, and Fisayo Akinade is a hilarious scene-stealer as the scientist lackey who begins warming to the methods of Charlie he observes from afar.
The ever-blossoming relationship between Dinah and Charlie is the emotional trunk of Grow, with the pairing of Rusheuvel and Brookwell a superb casting decision. Grow is ultimately a story of how we get the love that we give, from Dinah providing Charlie with a love she hasn’t truly had in her life, to providing nature itself with a little more love. The charming Grow might be a silly film, one that occasionally branches off into feeling like a CBBC show, but it does so with an irresistibly big heart.
Grow recently premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Edinburgh site for the title.
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