Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (2023)

Rating: D

Dir: Adam Sigal
Star: Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver, Tim Downie, Jessica Balmer

I am almost impressed that a film with such an unusual title, manages to be thoroughly dull. The premise is so ludicrous, it couldn’t possibly be believable. Except, it happened. In 1931, the Irving family, residents of a farm on the Isle of Man, reported their house was resided in by a talking mongoose, Jef, supposedly born in New Delhi in 1852. Their claims received significant coverage in the popular press of the time, though investigations by various paranormal researchers found no credible evidence to support the idea of a chatty Indian animal. While sceptics suspect the Irving’s daughter Voirrey created the hoax, using her abilities as a ventriloquist, she denied any involvement until her death in 2005.

Yet somehow, Sigal has managed to convert this bizarre story into a film which is flat and uninteresting. Matters are not helped nowadays, by Jef being voiced by Neil Gaiman, whose reputation is in the shitter. It does lend a certain creepiness to Jef’s pronouncements. The main thread of the story involves Nandor Fodor (Pegg), who was a real parapsychologist of the time, and among those who visited the Irvings. He and his assistant, Anne (Driver), make the trip to the Isle of Man in 1937. While he never sees the supposed creature, he does converse with it, including Jef telling Nandor the last thing said by Fodor’s father to him, before leaving Hungary: “I shall never see you again”. He’s shaken up by this, understandably.

But I can’t help feeling, a film about a goddamn talking mongoose should deliver something a bit more dramatic, than a man coming to terms in his relationship with his dead father. It’s also incredibly talky, right from an opening scene that is just Nandor debating with a journalist. Two minutes in, and we are already embroiled in a discussion about what we mean by “real”, and how this can be determined. It’s the kind of debate I last attempted at 2 am in the Student’s Union, and is not exactly what I signed up for here. It does set the tone though, Sigal the director clearly in love with Sigal the writer’s dialogue. For me, it felt like being trapped in a lift with a precocious nephew. 

I’d probably not have bothered, except for the presence of Pegg, though he looks tired, old and sports an awkwardly vague accent. Might be Hungarian. Might be Minnesotan. Hard to sure. Nobody else makes much impression, except perhaps for Christopher Lloyd as fellow investigator Harry Price. It is worth sticking around through the end credits, for a weird scene in which the cast and crew talk smack about Sigal. It feels like a joke, except there’s no payoff to it, or point I could discern. Guess this makes it a suitable summary of the film as a whole. By the end, I was questioning whether or not it deserved to go into the ‘comedy’ category, because I doubt I laughed once. I only relented, because it’s arguably a worse fit still, anywhere else.