The Magic Faraway Tree review: Andrew Garfield charms, but Enid Blyton's magic withers in a muddled modern update

"If a train runs at six miles an hour and has to pass under four tunnels, put down what the guard's mother is likely to have for dinner on Sundays."

Such was the befuddling question posed in the school of Dame Slap, who resided in the Land of Dame Slap, at the very top of the Faraway Tree in Enid Blyton's trilogy. It was maddening, absurd, and delightful — the kind of silliness that had a seven-year-old poring over those pages, giggling away.

So when the new film adaptation of The Magic Faraway Tree was released, starring a winsome Andrew Garfield and a stunning Claire Foy, that same reader, now a grown-up eight-year-old at heart, went looking for the laughs that had coloured a childhood: memories of Google Buns, pop biscuits, hot-and-cold sweets, delicacies Blyton invented so vividly they felt entirely real. That was her magic: She could make even the most mundane food sound like a dream, cucumber sandwiches included.

Sadly, that magic arrives rather frayed on screen. Watching the film feels like watching someone brandish a wand while fumbling the spell, getting half the words wrong, so what's left is a handful of sparks where a blaze should be.

The film tries to graft the wonder of a century-old novel onto an all-too-familiar, oversaturated premise: Children losing their childhoods to technology. It's an understandable instinct for a modern adaptation, but after so many other films have delivered the same sermon, it starts to feel exhaustingly tedious.

The setup itself is clumsily stitched together and more than a little far-fetched. On impulse, Foy's Polly quits her job; in a conversation that takes all of a minute, she and Garfield's Timmy decide to "live a dream" and decamp to the countryside with their three children — Jo, Beth, and Fran — who are, naturally, glued to their devices, with Beth practically training to be an influencer. From here, the film rushes forward in a kind of delirium, eager to skip straight to the good parts, which turn out to be few and far between. The parents settle into a derelict barn, with Timmy taking up tomato farming and Polly putting her architectural skills to work building a fully functioning home, water and electricity included. Meanwhile, Fran stumbles upon the Enchanted Wood entirely on her own.

You might expect the Enchanted Tree to feel like a true escape into dream logic. Instead, it plays more like a theme park introducing its characters one by one. Nicola Coughlan's Silky rushes through the pleasantries before we're dropped, almost too quickly, into the Land of Goodies, colourful and pretty, but with nothing substantial to chew on.

As the other children get swept into the "magic," a string of contrived adventures follows, mashing the Land of Birthdays together with the Land of Spells. Moreover, back in the real world, Polly's mother, played by Jennifer Saunders, refuses to accept that country living is a sensible choice.

By the time the film crosses the hour mark, the magic has all but stopped breathing. There are too many threads pulling at once: Beth's struggle to adjust to rural life, hints at Tim's own childhood, Moonface's refusal to accept that humans are permanent fixtures, the tomato farm subplot, and for reasons never quite justified, Silky grappling with her own insecurities, hidden under a "fight the patriarchy" narrative that feels distinctly bolted on.

Everything that made the books such a joy is conspicuously absent: The quirks that made each character distinctive without ever needing to announce themselves now either hover awkwardly in the background or vanish altogether. And then there's the food — or rather, the lack of it. The jellies, the iced birthday cakes, the gingerbread houses barely exist.

It begs the question: Why work so hard to invent new problems when the source material already offered more than enough? Why reach for 2026 anxieties when Blyton had already handed filmmakers a complete, functioning world?

Three children, Jo, Beth, and Fran, move to the countryside with their parents, discover a magical wood and an even more magical tree, and meet its residents: the Angry Pixie, the gentle Silky, Moon-Face, the Saucepan Man, and Watzisname, who could never quite remember his own name. Every chapter sent them into a different land, sometimes trapping them there whether the Land of Goodies, the Land of Do As You Please, or the Land of Take What You Want. There was magic built into the very structure of the stories. Did it really need revisiting, adapting, and reshaping into something else entirely?

Even conflict was already there for the taking. Blyton had written an entire arc around the Tree folk falling into danger, their leaves withering away, and the children racing to save the wood's magic before it's lost for good.

Garfield's presence in the film makes sense on paper, but there was surely a more graceful way to weave the parents into that story, rather than juggling so many disconnected threads that the film never quite finds its footing.

In the end, The Magic Faraway Tree is a film caught between two impulses, the urge to honour a classic and the urge to modernise it for an audience it doesn't quite trust to sit with simplicity.