This strange tale, about an Edwardian man of the cloth who believes he was a canine in a previous life, could easily have been called My Life as a Dog had Swedish director Lasse Hallström not laid claim to that title for his classic film in the Eighties.

It is, in fact, taken from My Talks With Dean Spanley, a slim novella by Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany in 1936. Hardly long enough to make a full-length feature, the original 50-page screenplay was amplified by Alan Sharp and is directed by New Zealander Toa Fraser, with an impressive international cast.

The result is a more than slightly eccentric mixture of the shrewd and the naïve. But, at its best, Dean Spanley is as original and imaginative a piece of storytelling as you are likely to see this side of Christmas.

To say, however, that it takes a long time to get going would be putting it mildly. We enter the 1904 drawing room of Horatio Fisk (Peter O’Toole), a tetchy veteran who is visited by his son Henslowe (Jeremy Northam) once a week with increasingly unsatisfactory results. Horatio, who has lost another son in the Boer War and seems to refuse much regret, treats Henslowe with brisk and dismissive rudery while allowing his son to wheel him in his new-fangled chair along to a public lecture by Swami Nala Prash (Art Malik) called The Transmigration of Souls. Old Horatio thinks it is complete rubbish and says so loudly, to the evident embarrassment of Henslowe.

There they meet Dean Spanley (Sam Neill) and Wrather (Bryan Brown), who describes himself as a “facilitator from the colonies”. What he is accustomed to facilitate for the good Dean is valuable bottles of Hungarian Tokay, his favourite sweet wine.

Having found an expensive bottle of Imperial Tokay with the help of Wrather, Henslowe invites Spanley to dinner. And after two or three glasses of his favourite tipple, the dean begins to talk. This is when the film, hitherto a slow but just about watchable progress, springs instantly to life, since we are now treated to the dean’s previous life as a dog with lovely flashbacks of the pleasure canines must have roaming in the wild, free from human bonds.

We discover it just so happens that old Horatio once had a dog whom he treated in such a way as to encourage the animal to escape. So he listens intently to the dean’s story, and it has an extraordinary effect on him. I had better not tell you any more of the story except to say that the film suddenly lights up the screen very movingly, giving each of the main characters a chance of some kind of personal redemption.

This is where the acting, always gravely appropriate for its immaculate Edwardian setting — shot in New Zealand as well as England — becomes something more.

In particular, O’Toole, with a face like a mask but whose blue eyes still pierce the screen without seeming ever to blink, traverses the last section of the film brilliantly in a brief but extraordinary tour de force. We are not only moved but begin to understand why he is like he is: a curmudgeon with a well-concealed heart.

As Dean Spanley, Neill contributes a character study that is perfectly modulated, while Northam, in a less obviously grateful part, hardly puts a foot wrong. With Malik and Brown, and Judy Parfitt as Horatio’s long-suffering housekeeper, this is an expert cast which knows precisely how to play Dunsany’s odd tale to its best advantage.
Sharp’s expert screenplay helps too, even though p and the producers were perhaps unwise to encourage him to amplify it into a feature that lasts 105 minutes when 90 would have surely been enough.

This is really a shaggy dog story that takes too long to start barking. But when it does, it works a treat. It’s amazing how much you can forgive if the last part of a movie is right, and this one covers itself in something like glory in the nick of time.