When i saw the trailer for this, i was kinda excited. I love louis partridge as an actor and i love the story of peter pan so naturally, because i love both i sat down and watched it. At first, i was really enjoying it, it was weird but enjoyable...and then adult wendy came on the screen. I was so disappointed with her acting i started skipping her scenes, which is basically the whole movie. Everyone else that was part of the darling girl line was actually thoroughly interesting, but adult wendy was so bad i was ready to pull a berry and jump out a window. I then came to find out the actress that played AW was also the director...it then made sense why she was casted with her bad acting skills. If all you are looking for is to see louis as peter (expecting a jeremy sumpter-espe heartthrob) you're better off watching clips on youtube of the scenes he's in (the scene with him in jane, i recommend bc it's hella cute) then watching peter pan from 2003.

Also the guy who plays hook...poor choice, especially with him weirdly forcing himself on wendy. Will never top jason isaacs's hook.

I was intrigued by the idea of this, as there can be so much to unpack from J. M> Barrie's original Peter Pan. However, this particular variant is unevenly scripted, erratically directed, and even more poorly acted--all by the same individual Livia de Paolis. What could have been a fascinating psychomachia of sexual awakening, gender expectations, mental illness, and family, falls far short of the mark.

This adaptation of Laurie Fox's novel skips a generation - it is Margaret who is Wendy II's mother rather than Jane (which in the original Barrie timeline makes sense, as Wendy was late Victorian/Edwardian; Jane was during WWII; Margaret would have been c. 1960s-70s; Wendy II: 1980s; and Berry c. 2010s). In Fox's novel, it is Wendy II grandmother Jane that goes missing, thereby bestowing the trauma of an absent mother on Margaret, who then inflicted her own traumas onto Wendy II. The removal of Margaret from de Paolis' adaptation makes the mystery and trauma both more immediate and more rushed in feeling (although this could be the result of a grossly inexperienced writer/director/actor in de Paolis), where Wendy II copes by writing letters to herself as if from her MIA mother as a child, but as an adult has borderline psychotic breaks that seem to come from nowhere.

De Paolis' accented English (presumably from Italian) immediately marks her as the cuckoo in the nest, where the younger iterations of the character have no such indicator. Furthermore, it seems that de Paolis is working from an entirely different set of motives/objectives than the rest of the cast, where adult Wendy experiences some kind of cognitive disorder that also never appears in her younger self or is explained. Furthermore, while a key aspect is the absences of Wendy II's mother Jane, this abandonment seems to impact adult Jane more than her younger self, enough so her own motherhood becomes a significant hurdle.

Iain Glen is sufficiently creepy as Hook; however, de Paolis is rather heavy handed when exploring Wendy II's sexual awakening from innocence to knowing, where the ostensible 13 year old Wendy is sexually assaulted by Hook, making the entire encounter uncomfortable. This, on top of Wendy II already being somewhat sexually precocious at 13 (as evidenced by her "happy thoughts poem" about being in bed with Peter) makes her entirely unbelievable as an adolescent to begin with. Furthermore, as the boy who never grew up, Louis Partridge's pan is absolutely grown, so instead of the impish Pan, we are left with a bizarrely aware man-child who would be more appropriate to being a College first year student rather than the embodiment of childhood at war with Hooks representation of adulthood.

In the end, this comes off as nothing more than a poor excuse for a vanity project for de Paolis. I can only wonder whether the source material is equally as weak as this film adaptation.

If you watch this hoping to see a retelling of Peter Pan, you won't. I think they're trying to talk about mental illness which confuses me to begin with. The acting is not great. The only reason I gave it two stars is because of Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson. Their acting was the only decent parts of the film. Adult Wendy was abysmal. Not worth watching. Don't waste your time.