The Portable Door: family-friendly adventure with ramshackle funhouse charm to spare
Around 15 years ago, when it became clear just how big the Harry Potter films were going to be, cinemas were duly flooded with screen translations of children’s fantasy novels, all keen to surf the lucrative trend. Their quality didn’t always correspond to that of their sources: Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising were outshone by lowlier works such as City of Ember and The Spiderwick Chronicles. But in the current drought of live-action films made specifically for preteens, it’s hard not to look back with envy at the glut.
Perhaps because Tom Holt’s 2003 novel The Portable Door wasn’t written specifically for younger readers, it was overlooked for adaptation back then – much of its comedy stemmed from the drudgery of office work. But this overtly family-friendly feature version feels like one the better products of that late-noughties gold rush.
Lightly inspired by the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Sorcerer, and owing a debt to the 2011 Philip K Dick-based thriller The Adjustment Bureau, it centres on a mysterious firm called JW Wells & Co, sandwiched in the City of London somewhere within the Gherkin’s immediate orbit. (The film was shot in Australia during the pandemic; the British capital appears via green screen in a handful of exterior shots.)
The company business is magically engineered coincidences – or, more darkly, herding the public down paths in life which feel either freely chosen or taken by chance. Christoph Waltz and Sam Neill, not just chewing the scenery so much as treating it like a personal Toby Carvery buffet, play the place’s two leading executives, and it is across their threshold that young graduate Paul Carpenter (Patrick Gibson, doing his best Tom Holland dopey ingenue) stumbles while combing the city for employment.
Almost as soon as he has settled in and made awkward small talk with Sophie (Sophie Wilde), his Hermione Granger-esque fellow new hire, the lad gets embroiled in a hunt through the offices for the object of the title: a portal to anywhere that can be summoned by holding an enchanted towel aloft, then dropping it while calling out “knock knock”.
Director Jeffrey Walker and screenwriter Leon Ford fill this warren of corridors and chambers with the sort of enticing mysteries that send under-12s’ imaginations into overdrive. Why on earth does that stapler keep turning up, for instance? And what’s on the end of those monstrous hands – creature effects courtesy of the Jim Henson Company – that keep poking through cracks in the walls? There’s ramshackle funhouse charm to spare here, and while the plot occasionally trips over the odd loose floorboard, the fun ideas and game performances soon pick it back up.
PG cert, 116 min. On Sky Cinema and NOW now
