The director Paul King, the magician behind the two Paddington movies and now Wonka, has a formula. Sweet-natured, sweet-toothed dreamers arrive in a strange land where they are forced to overcome adversity by employing, among other things, their passion and skill for creating sugar-based foodstuffs. King’s trademark box-of-delights storytelling approach combines showy, gymnastically agile editing and a disarmingly handmade, artisanal quality to the production design. At times, his films can venture a little too far towards a quirky, Etsy shop aesthetic, but for the most part, the alchemic King’s approach continues to create gold. Wonka is an effervescent pleasure – an endlessly, intricately charming treasure trove of a movie. And overall, Timothée Chalamet’s fresh-faced take on the central character – bringing a puckish innocence and spry, light-footed energy to one of the most famously jaded misanthropes in children’s literature – works rather well.
An origin story that traces the formative period in the early life of confectioner extraordinaire Willy Wonka, the film dances its way through some unexpectedly dark themes. Foremost of these is the fact that the illiterate Willy, so preoccupied with chocolate that he neglected to learn to read, fails to comprehend some crucial small print and finds himself trafficked into forced labour in a laundry, run by the leering Mrs Scrubbit (Olivia Colman) and her henchman Bleacher (Tom Davis). But there he meets a band of allies, all in hock to the treacherous Scrubbit, and forms a firm friendship with resourceful orphan Noodle (Calah Lane).
