49 Miles More review – screwball East Anglian road caper makes a smart left turn

Doug, the incessant funster played by Gregory Fung in this jaunty but finally poignant buddy comedy, joins the likes of The Hangover’s Alan Garner as the nightmarish BFF most likely to give you an aneurysm. After losing a round of bagsy, childhood pal Max (Reece Henderson) is saddled with chaperoning Doug to their annual lads’ night out, taking place in, of all places, Orford, Suffolk. Their car gets a flat tyre, leaving them stranded the titular 49 miles from their destination; of course Doug insists that walking the whole stretch will be a good laugh.

Hitting the beers at 10am, Doug is a one-man ambush: insisting on the miraculous properties of duct tape, demonstrating how he’d beat a whale in a fight, writhing around like a toddler in a precarious rubber dinghy. Contrasting him with Henderson’s straight man, director Oliver Cox doesn’t completely sanction this buffoonery. But his film also likes to run with its own absurdist streak, such as the driver (Caroline Webster) whose definition of going “not very far” turns out to be 10 metres down the road, or her lending them her “son’s bike” (a children’s tricycle) to help speed them on their way. If it gets over-silly at points, as with a bout of berry-induced squits, Cox operates with a curious unfilteredness, as if he’s letting some screwy family vernacular play out.

The film also has a persistent sweetness that wells up as the pair bond on the trail; in Doug’s admission of his fecklessness and Max offering up his despair regarding his insurance-drone career. But this sentimental streak widens considerably in a last-act twist on the Suffolk foreshore. Cox handles the transition sharply as the formerly antic comedy pays off to reverse effect in a series of surprisingly powerful call-back scenes. Where the mostly winning looseness of the journey sometimes threatens to stray off the trail, it’s this lastminute rally of dramatic discipline and hard truths that puts this no-budget hopeful on the map.