Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, 2023
Written and Directed by Adam Sigal.
Starring Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver, Christopher Lloyd, Neil Gaiman, Paul Kaye, Ruth Connell, Tim Downie, Gary Beadle, Edmund Kingsley, Cokey Falkow, Jessica Balmer, Damian Gallagher, Emilio Calcioli, Sharon Forbes, Aidan Towers, Drew Moerlein, and John Booker.
SYNOPSIS:
In 1935, Hungarian-American para-psychologist Nandor Fodor began his investigation of a strange occurrence on the Isle of Man. An average British family, the Irvings, claimed to have been contacted by a mysterious entity at their farm. A talking mongoose. Named Gef (Pronounced “Jeff”.)
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose wouldn’t exist.
The eponymous parapsychologist and psychoanalyst of Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose was skeptical of the supernatural, choosing to only believe in what he could see or sense in some manner of observation. Dr. Fodor (Simon Pegg, trying his best to salvage this trainwreck) takes on investigating such cases to evaluate the subject psychologically and why their minds are manifesting ghosts. It’s also made clear that part of his reason for doing so is his obsession with death, subconsciously hoping that spirits and the afterlife are real so that he might one day find closure with his deceased father.
The alcoholic doctor who consistently mistreats his loyal assistant Anne (Minnie Driver) also seems to have grown tired of dealing with the same circumstances, madness, and lies surrounding these cases but does have his interest piqued when, in the 1930s, one of the written letters she summarizes for him speaks of a talking mongoose that an entire British farming village believes is real despite there being no tangible evidence to back these claims up.
A case this strange would probably perk anyone up, to be fair, but writer/director Adam Sigal comes at this story with no sense of how to pace or structure the film. The whole exercise is a tonal oddity, unsure whether it should lean into quirkiness and funniness or take its themes seriously. Nevertheless, Dr. Fodor meets with an associate played by Christopher Lloyd, who has visited the village of this talking mongoose named Gef, where exposition is dumped for roughly 20 minutes, taking an outrageous amount of time to say the mongoose wasn’t interested in revealing himself to him.
One of the more frustrating aspects of this decision is that the movie is halfway over by the time Dr. Fodor arrives. Viewers are clumsily introduced to the village family twice, one of whom is a 17-year-old daughter skilled at ventriloquism, naturally rendering her a primary suspect if this is a ruse. Everyone in the village seems to have a story about Gef, usually with an asterisk (such as a grieving man stating that the day he saw and witnessed the mongoose talking to him, inexplicably waxing philosophical about death, was the day he quit drinking.)
There is no tangible throughline of what Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose is attempting to accomplish. It’s certainly not a fun movie, either. In its final minutes, the screenplay takes a hard turn into trying to understand why people write alongside questioning why someone would fabricate a story about a talking mongoose. The film also isn’t concerned with answering any of the questions viewers will want answered, but that’s not necessarily what makes this a bad movie. It’s great that the movie asks interesting questions, but fails to engage with them substantially.
If Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose sound like a mess, the cast and crew possibly knew things weren’t working during shooting. Post-credits, they, including star Simon Pegg, essentially get together for a montage trashing filmmaker Adam Sigal. At one point, they mention that Adam would behave like such a child that he would leave the set and have his dog direct the film and that those scenes are likely the only good ones. Now, if one wants to apply this as an inside joke playing on the theme that maybe these things didn’t happen if we didn’t actually see them, that is technically one way of looking at this. There is no punchline or apparent reason for the ribbing or disdain beyond speculating why it’s here.
But it’s much more fun to believe that Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, despite having a fascinating premise and approach to exploring the unexplainable, is such a disaster that the cast and crew wish they were doing anything else besides working with Adam Sigal. It would be hard to argue with them since the best part of the movie is an early, brief history of documented talking animals and footage of them mimicking human sounds.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
