Dream Horse review: Cinemas are open, so the feel-good Brit comedy is back

Dir: Euros Lyn. Starring: Toni Collette, Damian Lewis, Owen Teale, Joanna Page, Karl Johnson. Cert PG, 142 mins

The reopening of cinemas, on the brink of summer, necessitates the return of a certain brand of feel-good Brit comedy. In the tradition of The Full Monty (1997) and The Englishman who Went up a Hill but Came down a Mountain (1995), these stories see communities restored and united by some communal passion, be it striptease or cartography. They boost the box office and inject cheer into the ever-gloomy British Isles, before inevitably ending up on the DVD shelf of every Airbnb in existence.

Dream Horse fits this bill so perfectly, it’s almost Machiavellian. What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in the sheer force of its sincerity. Like so many of its type, the film takes inspiration from a heartwarming true story: in 2001, the small Welsh village of Cefn Fforest saw a plucky group of locals band together in order to breed and raise a foal they named “Dream Alliance”, each chipping in around £10 a week. Eventually, the horse was able to race on the courses of Aintree and Newbury, winning several prizes along the way. The story is well known enough that it’s already been the subject of a documentary, Dark Horse – which won the Audience Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

The group, known as a syndicate, was headed by Janet Vokes, who is here somewhat surprisingly played by the magnificent (and Australian) Toni Collette. It’s a slight change of pace for the actor – the accent is impressive, but Collette otherwise relaxes into the role, swapping the high-energy flair of Muriel’s Wedding or Knives Out for something softer, and more winsome in quality.

Janet is disillusioned by family life – her children have flown the nest, her supermarket job is now an endless chorus of checkout scanner beeps, and her husband is glued to his armchair, transfixed by what appears to be instructional videos on how to castrate an alpaca. But much like The Full Monty, Dream Horse is a film that sees hope and purpose spring out of communities hit by economic devastation. Janet is only one part of an entire, village-wide malaise. Cefn Fforest rises out of Wales’s coal mining past, its slag heaps borne like scars by the surrounding hills.

Janet crosses paths with Howard Davies (Damian Lewis), whose fixation on racing risks coming at the cost of his own marriage. But he, too, is chained to the past: his father ran away at 14 to become a jockey, before being dragged back home and forced into a life at the steelworks. It adds just the right level of tartness to a film that screenwriter Neil McKay and director Euros Lyn otherwise fill with majestic horse slo-mos, toilet humour provided by the local drunk (Karl Johnson), and obstacles that are easily overcome. All that’s needed is a bit of hwyl – a Welsh term that describes a kind of uplifting, motivational spirit. Dream Horse is rich with it.