Burn Burn Burn review – confident road-trip comedy about millennials

This confident, relaxed British feature debut by director Chanya Button and screenwriter Charlie Covell is a sort of millennials’ mashup of Laughter in Paradise and Last Orders. Cynical twentysomething Dan (Jack Farthing) has just died of cancer, and has posthumously ordered his two best friends Seph (Laura Carmichael) and Alex (Chloe Perrie) to go on a road trip across Britain to scatter his ashes in personally important locations, for reasons he announces in separate videos which they have promised to watch in each place. In engineering this cathartic quest, Dan plans to sort out their personal issues from beyond the grave. It’s not the most original premise, but it’s very nicely acted by Carmichael and Perrie (who was the lead in Scott Graham’s 2012 movie Shell). There are some great cameos from Julian Rhind-Tutt and Alison Steadman, and some startling moments, such as the surreal scene in which Alex has to play the crucified Christ in an am-dram production of the Passion, and makes a personal confession from the cross. Seph is horrified by Rhind-Tutt’s loopy hippies and their dodgy folk-cultural happenings: “That’s what happens when you’re arty but essentially a bit shit.”