The Nan Movie (2022)

The Nan Movie takes a beloved, foul-mouthed comic creation and gives her something surprisingly rare: a big-screen outing with a real heartbeat. Catherine Tate lets Nan bulldoze through a chaotic road-trip of raves, rugby lads, and general mayhem, but the film’s secret weapon is the wartime flashbacks—handsomely crafted, quietly affecting, and genuinely illuminating about the hurt beneath the insults. The tone swings from rude, riotous comedy to period-piece poignancy without turning sentimental, and when it lands, it feels earned. It’s not for everyone—there’s severe profanity and some deliberately ugly remarks—but if you can handle Nan’s abrasiveness, you’ll get laughs with an unexpectedly tender aftertaste.

The Nan Movie is clearly trying to stretch Catherine Tate’s beloved, foul-mouthed granny into a full road-trip comedy with a surprisingly sincere “make amends before it’s too late” backbone and wartime flashbacks meant to explain how she became so hard-edged. The problem is that the sketch energy doesn’t naturally expand into a feature, so the film can feel disjointed and padded, with a stop-start structure where the chaos (cops, raves, rugby lads) plays more like random detours than escalating comedy. If you don’t already love Nan’s abrasive, profanity-heavy persona, the relentless swearing and shocky one-liners may come off as tedious rather than funny, and the emotional origin-story beats won’t necessarily earn their keep. If you are a die-hard Catherine Tate fan, there are moments of committed performance and a few warm notes in the family dynamic, but for most viewers it’s a thin joke dragged past its natural runtime.