The Chocolate Club

A group of middle-aged depressives in Cornwall get together to form a support group, nominally over their shared loved of chocolate.

It’s seems that despite the great weather, top-of-the-line housing stock, and fresh sea air, everybody in Cornwall is depressed, or at least wants to go there to be depressed. As such, after a chance meeting in a café (where it’s £3.50 for a cup of tea!!), a bunch of Cornwall folk decide to get together in a shared space to discuss their respective problems and get fat over pounds and pounds of chocolate.

Rose (Edney) has returned from the Big Smoke following a break-up, with her best friend Simon (Russell) there to comfort her, while she spends time working out who she is as well as reminiscing over her dead grandmother. Dean (Kane) has joined up with his widower father, George (Billing) in the hope that it’ll get him out of the house and away from the bottle. Oscar (Taylor) appears homeless and just needs a place to be, Annette (Edgley) is a nurse and a Christian, who finds it hard to relate what she takes on every day, and Carrie (Hingott) is just there for the hell of it really, well, that and the chocolate, of course. All of this is led by therapist Stephen (Lewis Jones), who believes that love, which includes self-love first, is the answer to everyone’s problems, along with a little bit of sharing, a good dollop of support and kindness, and a whole smorgasbord of chocolate related items. And so, The Chocolate Club is born.

Over the next hundred minutes, The Chocolate Club get together to have it out over some cocoa, and get to know each other along the way. There’s the usual intrigue of the will they/won’t they relationships, the banishing of ghosts which have lived too long in the memory, the moving on from tragedy, and the blossoming of unlikely heroes to witness as we spend time at the club. And there’s chocolate, plenty of it, in all forms, it even finds form in the dialogue when the characters have nothing else to say to each other, which happens far more often than it should.

So with premise disguised as therapy, and a tenuous common link established, The Chocolate Club can set about tangling and untangling all of its threads for an hour and a half, selling its Hallmark TV messages of love and kindness and the magic of the holidays, all while trying to make its characters not seem like cookie-cutter stereotypes that have just been flown in on an industry stooge’s typewriter. Unfortunately, writer/director Deborah Hadfield never really manages this, and the members of The Chocolate Club remain restrained in romcom trope hell, with everyone going through the motions of their well-trodden arcs so that the audience can eventually get their happy-ending serotonin hit.

That’s not to say that the journey isn’t enjoyable. First, there’s the stunning Cornwall coastline to marvel at, with some great drone photography providing plenty of establishing shots and interludes of the waves crashing, to show it off in all of its natural glory. There’s some pretty nice music going on in the background, accompanying many of the scenes with some proper, home-grown, indie tracks that fit right in with the visuals and the scenario. And the acting’s pretty good, too, with everyone falling naturally into their characters to offer a realistic portrayal of regular people, with regular lives, coming together to help each other.

Sadly, the production never lifts at any point beyond Sunday TV movie standard, and the motivations of each character remain too lightly on the surface, despite the veneer of supposedly working through difficult problems. The conversations never feel as though they are really digging down into any real trauma and throughout the film there’s never even a hint at any actual drama. In the end, The Chocolate Club ends up being schmalzy, twee, and predictable, with there being a million other movies out there just like this one, still, if you like your movies to be saccharine and sickly sweet, you should find enough to keep you satisfied.