Third Star – review

Hattie Dalton's competent feature debut is an addition to that familiar genre in which a group of friends gathers around a dying close acquaintance or at their funeral for declarations of love, the exchange of reminiscences, the dragging of skeletons from cupboards and outbursts of blood-letting. In this case, the 29-year-old James (Benedict Cumberbatch), suffering from terminal cancer, takes a final trip along his beloved Pembrokeshire coast with three, middle-class, lifelong friends, all frustrated creative types, before making his quietus. They laugh, bicker bitterly, have bizarre encounters with some locals, experience minor calamities and it is all rather familiar and predictable, though not dislikable.