Boo The Radleys.

No one in The Radleys has any fun, and that includes the audience. A film that dares to ask, “What if Teen Wolf, but without jokes, charm, or a sense of genre irony?”, it trudges through its own bloodless metaphor with the kind of po-faced earnestness usually reserved for public information films about the dangers of joy.

Based on Matt Haig’s novel, the film follows the Radley family – mum, dad, two awkward teens – living a quiet, beige life in suburban Yorkshire. They’re abstainers, you see. Vampires, technically, but the kind who quote Byron and drink wheatgrass instead of blood. Damian Lewis plays Peter Radley and his twin brother Will, while Kelly Macdonald is Helen Radley, the long-suffering matriarch. Their kids, Rowan (Harry Baxendale) and Clara (Bo Bragason), are just starting to realise that they don’t quite fit in – and it’s not just adolescent awkwardness. Something darker is bubbling under the surface, but the film is determined to treat it like eczema rather than existential crisis.

But excitement isn’t really on the menu here. The film goes to impressive lengths to flatten every potentially pulpy flourish into social allegory. Want teen vampire transformations as a metaphor for adolescence? Sure, but only if that metaphor is delivered like a GCSE English essay, complete with underlining. The arrival of Uncle Will – with Damian Lewis turning up the temperature slightly for his secondary role – briefly threatens to kick the story into gear, but the film can’t quite cope with his unruly vitality. Instead of leaning into his disruptive presence, it scolds him narratively, like a supply teacher who’s just confiscated a vape.

There’s a perverse kind of discipline at work throughout The Radleys. Every time it encounters a fork in the road – horror, comedy, satire, camp – it resolutely chooses restraint. Tonally, it lands somewhere between Suburban Gothic and a Channel 4 drama pilot that never made it past the focus group. You can sense the film desperately wanting to say something important about repression, conformity, and family secrets, but it’s so afraid of melodrama it ends up delivering its message in a monotone whisper.

Director Euros Lyn has form in genre television (Doctor Who, His Dark Materials), and you can see the scaffolding of something more playful underneath it all – a sense that the premise was once wittier, or at least less convinced of its own solemnity. But the final product treats the supernatural as a literary inconvenience rather than an invitation to mischief. It’s all coded addiction and bourgeois shame, which might land if the film didn’t keep retreating into a safe, middle-class fugue state every time things threaten to get weird or messy.

The supporting cast – including Sophia Di Martino, Shaun Parkes, Jay Lycurgo, and Siân Phillips – are uniformly capable but underused, like a lineup of guests waiting to be called onto a talk show that never actually airs. There’s competence everywhere, but conviction is harder to find. If you’re the sort of person who watched Let The Right One In and thought, “Yes, but could it be more British and less memorable?” then this might be your jam. For everyone else, The Radleys is a textbook example of how to drain all the fun out of a perfectly good monster metaphor.