Mr Malcolm’s List film review: A charming but slender piece of Jane Austen fan fiction

Mr Malcolm’s List plays like Jane Austen fan-fiction, which isn’t the worst subgenre in the world, even if nobody could ever confuse the plot with that of Lady Susan, let alone Pride and Prejudice.

The project boasts a plucky origin story: Suzanne Allain self-published the novel Mr Malcolm’s List in 2009, before adapting it into a script that made its way on to The Black List, Hollywood’s famous compendium of best unproduced screenplays. A Black List podcast in 2015 attracted director Emma Holly Jones, who made a short film from the source material in 2019, before graduating to a feature.

Set in England in 1818 — and shot in Ireland last year — Jones’s handsome directorial debut concerns the eligible bachelor of the title (Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù, this week’s “next James Bond” contender). Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton) is one of many society ladies jostling for Mr Malcolm’s attention — not to mention his “20,000 a year” — but when she fails to say anything of note on the matter of the corn laws, she is dropped after one eyelash-fluttering evening at the opera.

Mr Malcolm’s List jollies through its own checklist: poor clergyman’s daughter, rival suitor and sudden remorse

Acting on a tip from her cousin Lord Cassidy (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) a scorned Julia sends for her former childhood chum Selina (Freida Pinto), a beautiful and well-read country mouse. Together they hatch a plan to humiliate Mr Malcolm, using insider knowledge of the exacting checklist by which he evaluates women. Potential GFs must be “handsome of countenance and figure” and should “educate herself by extensive reading”.

Inevitably, the scheme goes awry when Selina and Mr Malcolm — try to look surprised — fall for one another.

It’s to Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù's credit that he manages to endow Mr Malcolm with charm. A lesser actor might have left the audience wondering why he couldn’t have perished (brutally, preferably) in the Napoleonic wars.

Freida Pinto, leading a commendably colour-conscious cast, brings a calm and contemporaneous girl power to her character without seeming too madly anachronistic.

A creamy confection pitched at Bridgerton fans rather than 19th-century novel aficionados, Mr Malcolm’s List jollies through its own checklist: poor clergyman’s daughter, rival suitor and sudden remorse. Happily, Pam Downe’s empire line dresses compensate for any deficit in psychology or novelty.