Film Review: A Kind of Kidnapping sees a daring heist come a cropper

A Kind of Kidnapping.

• A Kind of Kidnapping
• ★★★★☆
• Digital download

Desperate to fund a way out of functional poverty in post-Brexit Northern England, and dreaming of an escape to the South of France, failing actress Maggie (Kelly Wenham) and her computer geek boyfriend Brian (Jack Parry-Jones) carry out A Kind of Kidnapping (15A) when the drunken Tory MP Richard Hardy (Patrick Baladi) falls asleep in the back of Brian’s taxi.

Their audacious plan comes a cropper at the first fence, however, when Richard’s wife Lyndsey (Olivia Poulet) refuses to pay the ransom for her philandering husband — although that’s just the first of many twists in a darkly comic heist-gone-wrong caper.

A Kind of Kidnapping.

Written and directed by Dan Clark, and filmed, one imagines, on the proverbial shoestring, A Kind of Kidnapping revels in wrong-footing its audience at virtually every turn, as the micro-aggressions of the bickering couple undermine their hastily laid plans.

Patrick Baladi is as smarmily self-important as you might expect a fictional Tory MP to be, but Kelly Wenham is the star of the show as Maggie — off her meds this week, alas — discovers that her acting skills aren’t quite up to the job of ad-libbing the most dramatic scenes she will ever play.