The Bystanders review – British parallel-universe comedy of invisible guardian angels

Peter (Scott Haran) is a former child chess prodigy who these days excels at nothing much in particular, except perhaps his ability to blend into the background. A birthday card at his office is handed to him to sign – for his own birthday. None of his colleagues know who he is, and the card is crammed with polite, anodyne messages. But he discovers that there’s one arena in which his anonymity might be a boon rather than a liability: he is recruited into the world of Bystanding, a parallel universe filled with invisible guardian types whose job is to imperceptibly guide or nudge their charges into making better life choices. They are all, in their own ways, as unremarkable as Peter, hence their selection for bystander duty.

There’s a scrappy energy to this British sci-fi comedy that offsets its micro-budget limitations. The premise is part of a cinematic family tree of quirky, metaphysical science fiction that includes the likes of Cold Souls, The Adjustment Bureau and Another Earth. There’s also a strong strand of UK comedy in the DNA, recalling material like Red Dwarf and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in its desire to juxtapose the mundane, trivial annoyances of life with a more expansive sense of the universe. There’s something neat too about the film’s focus on life’s quiet losers, in an era when the loudest “main character energy” personalities seem predestined for rewards in the attention economy. It almost feels like a throwback to the loose mumblecore movement of the early 2000s.

Filmed mainly on location in and around east London, this modest film clearly doesn’t have a lot of cash to splash, but sets out to prove that you don’t need much money to have a reasonably interesting idea and make a diverting film. Sci-fi is often thought of as an expensive genre, but it doesn’t have to be; this micro-budget effort proves that leaning in to charmingly cheap SFX can prove just as engaging – or even more so – than throwing billions at the screen to create a soulless churn of random pixels in the service of the latest cookie cutter superhero adventure.