“A holiday in your head,” one character describes – with wonderful brevity – the power of a good story, in this film adaptation of Dennis Kelly’s popular stage musical – itself adapted from Roald Dahl’s novel Matilda. The same sentiment could just as easily be applied to the film itself. A colourful, sweeter-than-sweet spectacle that is gleefully over the top and leans wholeheartedly into its own fantastical premise, Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical (to give its full title) serves as a rousing, crowd-pleasing winter warmer.

Emma Thompson, doused heavily in prosthetics, cuts a figure of pantomime villainy as the nefarious disciplinarian Miss Trunchbull, headmistress of the neo-Dickensian establishment Crunchem Hall. There she runs less of a tight ship than a military vessel, a place that is more prison than school where students – regularly referred to as ‘maggots’ – are subjected to Full Metal Jacket-style ‘Phys-Z’ lessons and punishment in the form of a trip to the infamous ‘Chokey’. 

So it’s perhaps a little surprising that kid genius Matilda, played with boundless energy by newcomer Alisha Weir, seems so eager to attend. Then again, her home life is far from a fairytale, undermined and neglected by her parents (Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough on scenery-chewing form) to the point that Matilda’s local mobile library, run by Sindhu Vee’s Mrs Phelps, has become something of a surrogate home for this voracious reader.  

Director Matthew Warchus, who also helmed the stage play, crafts an all-singing, all-dancing delight of a movie packed so full of soul-soothing moments that the diluting of the darker elements of Dahl’s story (something the late author may well have grumbled at) hardly feels like an issue at all. And while Thompson has the showier role, it is Lashana Lynch who quietly steals the show as Miss Honey, Matilda’s compassionate teacher who harbours a dark secret. Lynch, who has rapidly become a household name thanks to recent turns as a fierce warrior in The Woman King and the first female 007 in No Time To Die, shows a more restrained side here, giving a film already brimming with charm an added dusting of genteel magic.

With earworms aplenty and kineticism by the cakeload, Matilda The Musical is a joyously entertaining slice of film escapism – one that maggots young and old are sure to fall in love with. 

Dir. Matthew Warchus (PG, 117 mins)

Matilda The Musical is out in cinemas from Fri 25 Nov

words GEORGE NASH