Directed by Richard Eyre
Starring Jennifer Saunders, Bally Gill, Derek Jacobi, David Bradley, Russell Tovey, Lorraine Ashbourne, and Judi Dench

Nursing is important and they love us for being us, through sickness and in health. This is what Allelujah has taught me. Despite not clicking on as to why exactly this title was chosen, I feel wholesome and my faith in the medical system has been renewed, even though happy endings are typically hard to come by in the field.

Established during the opening minutes of Allelujah is the monogamous grind between the everlasting trust of patient and medical staff alongside the crushing reality that there is simply no cure for old age. From there, we’re taken on a blissful tour of what it’s like to be in the ward tendering to those destitute to retirement homes, but momentarily stuck in the sick ward at the Bethlehem, or the Beth if you want to sound local. 

As a clamping down from the National Health Service threatens the very survival of small-time establishments like the Beth, we’re left to watch those who have their lives invested in the building contemplate what it means as time continues to march forward and they themselves, along with the hospital, faces being forgotten in the canyon of time.

The film does a comprehensive job at covering all bases of the encompassing field of medicine, and the diverse roster of characters at the receiving end of its care. Trips are taken back through the lives of patients and glimpses are given into the spare time staff have outside the Beth. Both perspectives offer enough to get you invested in their plights, struggles, and minor victories. Though this feel-good flick doesn’t dally too vigorously into the dark side of the trade, when it does, the brief realities we’re spoon-fed are haunting and reminiscent of our darkest fears of what shambles the medical system can be.

If you’re not British, there are some slights that could fly over your head, some slang that doesn’t exactly land with the same grace as if you were a true local, but the gist is the same no matter which hospital we’ll all eventually wind-up in. They’re all just cogs in the bigger machine, that beast in the English context being NDS. 

I can’t say I didn’t learn things while watching Allelujah, but it was mainly what I already knew that affected me most as I left the cinema. The fact that as time moves on certain things become neglected. A heart-warming ode to nurses that this film presents captures the struggle to maintain the balance between past and the future. It’s bittersweet, but as I age myself, I find that bitter is becoming the new sweet in stories such as this.

Allelujah is showing in cinemas across Australia from April 6th.

Moviedoc thanks Transmission Films, Miranda Brown Publicity and TM Publicity for the invite to the screening of this film.

Reviewed by Zak Wheeler for Moviedoc

©