Four Edwardian men are united by the conviction that in a previous life they were dogs. Comedy-drama starring Jeremy Northam, Sam Neill, Bryan Brown and the great Peter O‘Toole England, 1904 - a country of starched collars and strict etiquette. Dean Spanley ostensibly resembles something from that great bastion of Edwardian England on screen, Merchant Ivory, (see Howards End, A Room With A View, etc) but the similarity is purely superficial. Dean Spanley is a very different proposition.

For a start it is one of the few features films - after René Clair‘s 1944 It Happened Tomorrow - based on the writings of the almost forgotten Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, aka Lord Dunsany. Dunsany was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer, best known for his fantasy works and for his influence on JRR Tolkien, HP Lovecraft and Ursula LeGuin.

Veteran screenwriter Alan Sharp (The Osterman Weekend) here adapts Dunsany‘s 1936 short novel ‘My Talks With Dean Spanley‘ and introduces a new character, a father for the book‘s narrator Henslowe Fisk. It‘s a good thing too, as that new character, Fisk Senior, provides the ever-industrious, 79-year-old Peter O‘Toole with a gem of a role.

Fisk Senior is a right old so and so. He‘s full of beans, but also set in his ways, giving his son Henslowe, aka Young Fisk, (Northam), and housekeeper Mrs Brimley (Parfitt) a hard time. Henslowe visits his father each Thursday and is getting mighty sick of the routine - argue, eat hotpot for dinner, go home. So he determines to get the old man out of the house, a sepulchral place since the death of Fisk Senior‘s second son and wife.

Father and son attend a talk about reincarnation given by an Indian swami (Malik). There they encounter dubious Australian "conveyancer" Wrather (Brown) and the Dean of the film‘s title (Neill). They run into the Dean again at Fisk Senior‘s club afterwards, where he‘s enjoying his favourite tipple, an unusual Hungarian wine called Tokay. When Henslowe meets the Dean again he resolves to get to know him better. He invites him to dinner, luring him with the promise of Imperial Tokay, a drink so special it would normally "take a royal decree to have one uncorked".

When the Dean has started on the Tokay, something unusual happens - he starts to reminisce about his past life as a dog. Wrather himself soon joins them for further dinners, and the film becomes an investigation into the personality of dogs and the nature of reincarnation. Henslowe even even sees a way of shaking his father out of his fixed ways - themselves unspoken expressions of his losses - by inviting him along too. After all, the only thing Senior still talks about with any passion is the dog he lost in his childhood.

Toa Fraser, the half-British, half-Fijian, New Zealand-raised director handles all this deftly. Superficially it‘s a long way from his debut as a feature director, No. 2, a drama set among a Fijian-Kiwi extended family in contemporary Auckland, but both films feature strident characters and unspoken family issues.

Fraser is, of course, helped by the fact that he has a great script and a great cast. O‘Toole especially relishes his character‘s curmudgeonly come-backs. Neill also has fun as the canine churchman who, after a drop of Tokay, spends the time sniffing and expounding on what it is to be a dog ("Oh, there‘s nothing wrong with a few fleas. They serve admirably to get one‘s grooming going.")

It‘s not all laughs and eccentricity, however. Dean Spanley is also a film that deals with bereavement, specifically Fisk Senior‘s inability to express grief. The climax, where the film‘s various strands converge, is moving, and provides a neat pay-off to all the oddball proceedings and ornately smart (arsed) linguistic quirks that have gone before.

Fraser and his team of DP Leon Narbey (Whale Rider, No. 2) and production designer Andrew McAlpine (The Piano) balance the sharp dialogue with mellow interiors, heavy furnishings and diffuse light, and the film features some of England‘s finest period locations.