If you would like to spend time watching Alan Cumming traipse around the Scottish Highlands, I would recommend any season of “The Traitors” on Peacock over the Toronto International Film Festival premiere “Glenrothan.” One of these things has intrigue, murder, thrilling cinematography, and fabulous costumes. The other has a flat script and the tenor of a Hallmark movie. It’s the latter that happens to be getting a glitzy premiere here in Canada.
This is not just my half-hearted plea for a major cinematic institution to program a “Traitors” marathon. (Put Gabby Windey on a jury! That would be fun!) It’s also a dig at “Glenrothan,” a waste of a talented cast, including Brian Cox, who pulls double duty as director.
In fact, it is because of the promise of Cox stepping behind the camera that eyes are on “Glenrothan” at TIFF, but the venerated performer brings none of the bite of his best performances to this task. One would think a man now most famous for bellowing “fuck off” on “Succession” might have chosen a project with a bit more edge. Instead, “Glenrothan” is a surface-level tale of family drama that isn’t all that dramatic.
Cox plays Sandy Nairn, the CEO of his family’s prestigious whiskey company in the pristine village of Glenrothan surrounded by rolling green hills. After a blast of discordantly jaunty music, the film opens with Sandy’s voice dictating a letter to his estranged brother Donal (Cumming), encouraging him to return to his homeland. Sandy’s health is failing and he wants to see his kin. Donal, a nightclub owner in Chicago obsessed with the blues, has resisted going back to the land of lochs for reasons that will become only somewhat clear over the course of the run time. Plus, he’s having too much fun singing “One Meat Ball” to an enthusiastic audience.
Donal eventually relents, however, after his venue burns down in a convenient plot device. So he joins his daughter Amy (Alexandra Shipp) and her young child on their trip. These two visit Sandy regularly, having seemingly established a very close relationship with him despite the fact that Donal has been out of contact for the duration of Amy’s life.
“Glenrothan” is full of puzzling details like these, in which it seems like the script by David Ashton is just finding lazy ways to get its characters all into the same place. There’s a clunkiness that pervades the entire enterprise. The dialogue is particularly wooden and the actors struggle through mixed metaphors like, “Be careful on time, it can creep up on you like a shitstorm.” That line is spoken by Cumming with zero irony.
The reasons why Donal has avoided this gorgeous place all of these years is teased out over a series of heavy-handed flashbacks where we learn, essentially, that his father was hard on him and he was very close to his mother, who died. There is no shocking trauma in Donal’s past, just a father who put a lot of pressure on him. It all makes his behavior seem petulant rather than rooted in some great pain. Not that the townspeople, who treat him like some sort of true pariah, are much better.
All the principal actors in the cast appear lost. Shipp is tasked with scolding her father and delivering leaden exposition. Cumming truly only comes alive when he’s singing. Blessedly, there are a couple of moments when the natural showman gets to croon and they are the most enjoyable. Otherwise, Cumming has to externalize all of Donal’s feelings, as the screenplay has him speaking out loud to himself instead of letting him show his strife. Perhaps the performer done dirtiest is Mike Leigh and Kelly Reichardt veteran Shirley Henderson, playing Donal’s former best friend and Sandy’s now right hand. Too often her character requires her to fall into hysterics.
Perhaps most confusing is Cox’s apparent disinterest in his part, considering he is the one that chose this material. Maybe he was relishing the chance to play someone with far more warmth than Logan Roy, but Sandy is just a vaguely nice guy who Donal resented for many years for reasons that are unclear. Cox at least gets to sneer the word “wastrel” at some point — the only beat where you see a hint of what makes him usually such a thrilling presence. (He also farts. So there’s that.)
As a director Cox also seems lost. During a sequence in which Donal starts jamming with a band at the local pub, Cox doesn’t know where to place the camera, quick cutting between fingers playing instruments in a harried fashion. Elsewhere the action is statically staged. Cinematographer Jaime Ackroyd certainly captures Scotland’s majesty, but there is no character to the frames, which look like they could be plucked out of a commercial from a tourism bureau.
By the end of the lugubrious 97 minutes any issues the Nairn family had — as undeveloped as they are — are neatly resolved. There’s far more humanity in display in an episode of “The Traitors.”
“Glenrothan” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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