What We Did on Our Holiday (2014)

What We Did on Our Holiday arrives from 2014, a year in which British cinema was still permitted the luxury of a small domestic comedy about a dying man and his squabbling offspring. Doug and Abi, separated and pretending otherwise, drive their three children to the Scottish Highlands for the 75th birthday of Gordie, who is terminally ill and largely delighted about it. The children, being children, cannot hold the secret. This is the engine of the thing, and it runs smoothly enough.

The cultural inventory is thin. The cast is uniformly white and British, and no effort has been made to correct this. There are no queer characters, no racial reckoning, no environmental anxiety, no critique of the millionaire brother's mansion and its catering. Gavin's wealth exists to make him smug, not to indict a system. The film's lessons, such as they are, concern honesty and the importance of family, delivered with a light hand that stops well short of a sermon. Body image, neurodivergence, the historical record: absent, untouched, unbothered.

The third act, in which the children cremate their grandfather on a makeshift Viking raft and set him adrift, briefly suggests a film with opinions about death, ritual, and the state's intrusion into grief by way of social workers and the tabloid press. It does not develop them. The parents reconcile enough to divorce politely. Everyone splashes in the shallows. A pleasant afternoon, culturally speaking, with nothing on its conscience and nothing on its mind.