91 min | PG | June 17, 2022 | Focus Features
A lonely inventor in rural Wales builds a robot out of a washing machine and a mannequin head, then names it Charles. Charles learns to talk, develops opinions, and decides he wants to see the world. Turns out the hardest thing you can build is a kid who stays.
Brian is a lonely Welsh inventor who builds junk in a shed and waits for the world to notice him. His machines fail. Then he assembles a robot from a washing machine and a mannequin head and calls it Charles. Charles wakes up, learns English from a dictionary, and develops a personality bigger than the cottage can hold. The film is a mockumentary about loneliness that uses an absurd contraption to ask what a parent owes a child who wants to leave home.
David Earl plays Brian as a man who narrates his own life to a camera crew because no one else will listen. His optimism is a defense, and Earl lets the desperation show through the cheerful patter. Chris Hayward voices and operates Charles from inside the costume, giving the robot a stubborn curiosity that curdles into teenage rebellion. The two play their scenes like an aging father and a child outgrowing him in fast-forward. Louise Brealey plays Hazel with a shy warmth that the bully Eddie, played by Jamie Michie, exists only to threaten.
Jim Archer directs from a script by Earl and Hayward, and he commits fully to the documentary conceit. The handheld camera follows Brian into his shed and lingers on his failed inventions as if they are evidence. The Welsh countryside shot in flat natural light makes the cottage feel both cozy and isolating. Archer keeps the visual effects deliberately crude. Charles is a man in a box, and the film never pretends otherwise, which is the joke and the heart of it at once.
The premise is a single gag stretched across a feature, and the seams show in the middle stretch. The Eddie subplot supplies conflict the central relationship does not need. What saves the film is its refusal to wink. Brian and Charles take their bond seriously, and so does the movie, which earns the small emotional payoff at the end.