Dream Alliance may only have a less than 1% chance of coming first in a race, but thankfully no one seems to have told the horse.
I won’t lie, Toni Collette may be starring in a feel-good dramady about a former mining village in Wales and a racehorse; but there’s a moment in this trailer when I saw the same determined darkness in her expression that we saw when she played Annie the mum in Ari Aster’s horror Hereditary.
It’s based on a true story, otherwise instead of “joyous” the reviewer comments in the trailer would be something like “entirely unbelievable”.
But Dream Horse looks to have more about it than your average Britcom, which is usually based on a 10-year old-article from the Taunton Advertiser about cheerleading milkmen.
Obviously they’ve tried to make the extremely beautiful Collette look like a frump, by putting her in a bad wig.
But this is about class, and hope, and fighting back; and we also get to see a foal ultrasound which was a first for me. Plus the cast is top notch, with Colette as barmaid and cleaner Jan Vokes and Damian Lewis as local accountant Howard Davies, with whom she sets up a racehorse syndicate.
Watch the trailer now:
Jan is ground down, and wants something to get excited about; and I don’t think husband Brian (Owen Teale) quite fits the bill (Owen, I remember you back in the 80s in The Fifteen Streets when you were scorching in your flat cap!)
She and Howard gather together a group of locals, all prepared to put in £10 a week to pay for a baby racehorse.
Dream Horse is written by Neil McKay and directed by Euros Lyn. Also starring Joanna Page, Peter Davison and Sian Phillips, it’s out in the UK on 17 April and the US on 1 May 2020.
Here’s the full synopsis:
Jan Vokes, a cleaner and bartender, recruits her initially reluctant husband Brian and local accountant Howard Davies to help her bring together a syndicate of local people to breed a foal – which they name Dream Alliance.
On the racetrack, he proves himself to be more than a match for the multi-million pound racehorses he comes up against – a true working-class champion, taking on the establishment at their own game.
But much more than this, Dream begins to alter the lives of everyone in the syndicate, not least Jan’s. He is everything to her: friend, confidant and an escape from a life of always putting other people’s needs first.
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