A Fantastic Fear of Everything Reviews

A fantastically odd piece of absurd circumstance. Beautifully filmed and staged, this one may lag in the second act but comes back strong.

This is a film that I find to be both charming and frustrating. It’s the story of a writer having a cataclysmic breakdown as he attempts to segue from children’s literature into more adult fare. Unfortunately his research on his desired topic, serial killers of Victoria Britain, has created in him an acute phobia of being murdered. The film starts with this writer, Jack (Simon Pegg), already in a state of turmoil and proceeds from there.

It’s got a claustrophobic, shambling, energy that almost immediately puts you into Jack’s head. If the film is successful at anything it’s in creating a truly fevered, and frenzied, state and maintaining that for the majority of its running time. There are occasional buoys of sanity, but for the most part we’re stuck in Jack’s headspace. As such the film is often not particularly pleasant, with the claustrophobia and atmosphere becoming so thick to become almost vicelike.

At these moments the film’s saving grace is its energy and direction. It feels at times like a bizarre mixture of THE MIGHTY BOOSH and Pegg’s collaborations with Edgar Wright. Although truth be told despite it’s at times maniac energy it veers closer to BOOSH than Wright’s movies (it doesn’t have the sheer control of focus of Wright’s movies for one). The film is populated with cutaway and moments of barely lucid surrealism and it is at times exhausting. Whilst Pegg is good in the main role he’s not a strong enough force to completely ground the whole endeavour and as it such it feels at several times like the film is massively going off the rails. It’s keeping with the tone of the film, but it also doesn’t feel particularly planned. As such it’s hard not to come away with the feeling that first time directors Crispian Mills and Chris Hopewell don’t have sure enough hands as directors. Which is a shame because there are moments of the film that are fantastic.

In fact one of the main frustrations of the film is that it’s jam packed with great, indelible, moments that are almost throttled by the cumbersome husk of the film as a whole. It’s a real curate’s egg and the effect after a while is to bring to mind a sketch show rather than a cohesive narrative. But when the film works, it WORKS, and that is where the frustration comes in. Because it’s a film that is wrong footed by its own ambition and own desire to try new things. When the film allows itself to go off on some narrative diversion it really comes to life and gains a sense of playfulness that is missing from the main narrative. Sure the moments where it tells a tale via the medium of stop motion animation are a refreshing change of pace, but they’re also memorable because they feel more fully formed and coherent than the main story.

In fact the main narrative really only kicks into gear within it's last ten or fifteen moments, where an outside force finally pierces the self inflicted misery of the first two acts. In fact the last act is perhaps the moment when the film really has any consistency and it's largely because it gives Pegg a chance to interact with other people and become a part of an ensemble.

At the end of the day it feels like a director’s workshop come to life and some of the results are absolutely fantastic, it’s just a shame that the film is hung around the hoary old cliché of a writer having a nervous breakdown. It feels completely played out and means the main narrative is particularly difficult to invest in.

Any comedy starring Simon Pegg in the leading role will at least be worth giving a try. However, he does not have close friends and regular collaborators Edgar Wright or Nick Frost by his side this time but following previous performances in films such as Run Fatboy Run, Pegg certainly knows how to be in a decently entertaining comedy. Within A Fantastic Fear Of Everything there were uncertainties of what to expected how it was going to turn out. Therefore, it was rather mixed. Unfortunately, Simon Pegg stars in a film that is a catastrophe and is simply an all-round chaotic mess.


Based on the novella Paranoia And The Launderette by Bruce Robinson, musician Crispian Mills takes the role of both co-director alongside more sophisticated video director Chris Hopewell. Film director and screenwriter newbies usually start off well or earn Academy Award nominations but the lack of experience really got the best of Mills and Hopewell in A Fantastic Fear Of Everything. For this reason, the flaws were incredibly easy to notice. The story as a whole is rather corny and it simply did not know what it wanted to be to the audience. It is literally trapped between what could have been a hilarious and fun comedy or an intense thriller. Yet it could have been your vintage traditional horror-comedy.


There is no doubt Simon Pegg is truly one of the greatest living British actors and has performed in as well as written some of the most entertaining films of this generation. However, his performance as novelist Jack is perhaps at the very lowest standard of what he can do as he was neither funny nor sympathetic enough for the audience to find him an entirely likeable character. However, there was something rather interesting about Jack’s character that had not been further analysed on the screen. We get a minor understanding of how writers and even actors are influenced and affected by characters of their own creation. Furthermore, it partially shows the impact upon the audiences and how fictional and formerly real horror characters work. Simon Pegg’s role really was not anything that he is capable of doing and can perform a lot better than in A Fantastic Fear Of Everything. Seeing as Jack was pretty much the only character throughout the entire film, there were very few to include that were even call supporting characters. Hellraiser actress Clare Higgins portrayed Jack’s colleague Clair and Amara Karan performed as Jack’s possible love interest Sangeet. Considering that both were supporting characters, their appearances were irrelevant as neither of them served any purpose in this film whatsoever.


Overall, A Fantastic Fear Of Everything is truly an extraordinary film that perhaps tried to revolutionize a new type of comedy, but simply did not work and failed miserably. Where a film truly suffers the most is if it does not express to the audience what it is aiming to be to them. Therefore, it was not really anything at all. Pegg really has hit rock bottom in this role but he deserves and can perform at a much higher standard. There is no need to expect anything like works between both Pegg and Edgar Wright nor an individual Pegg comedy. So, it is truly a film on its own and if one is to somehow enjoy this, they will need to be the most open-minded people in the world with the most unorthodox sense of humor.