Miss Willoughby and the Haunted Bookshop

Miss Willoughby and the Haunted Bookshop is a simple old fashioned British whodunit mystery.

Miss Willoughby is not Miss Marple and this story is definitely not a Agatha Christie story. Also the movie has a TV look and may be a bit slow for some, but it is a good story with very likable actors.

We open in 1996 and young Elizabeth Willoughby is attending her parents funeral. Elizabeth inherits the family's elaborate huge English Estate complete with full-time servants. A family friend, Robert (Kelsey Grammer) becomes Elizabeth's Guardian and caretaker of the Family Estate.

Robert raises Elizabeth and trains and teaches her fitness, martial arts, chess. And ancient war strategies.

Then we cut 25 years later, and now an adult, a book author, and Professor of Ancient Civilizations, Elizabeth (Nathalie Cox) is asked to investigate a series of hauntings at her friend's Bookshop.

As Elizabeth starts to investigate, she begins to question the possibility that this may be a real ghost.

The movie is more of a fun British TV show and doesn't really take itself too seriously but I did enjoy it. The ending suggest that this may be the first of many more Miss Willoughby mystery films.

It's a slow mystery set in leafy rural England, similar to a lot of UK TV shows.

Quite predictable, but full of lots of good British comedy actors like Caroline Quentin. Kelsey Grammer is as watchable as ever.

This won't set your world on fire but it passed a pleasant 95 minutes for me.

This movie is better than any Hallmark Original that would come up with the same premise, and that is good enough for me to watch it till the end.

The chemistry between the two leads is believable, the pace of action does not stall once the 1st act is done, and the final act has enough surprises/turns to make the 95 previous minutes worth it.

Right, well initially I was lured in by this 2021 crime mystery's title. I mean, with it being titled "Miss Willoughby and the Haunted Bookshop", I figured that I would be in for something with some kind of haunting.

But imagine my surprise when I found out that what I was in for was something rather different. Yeah, "Miss Willoughby and the Haunted Bookshop" from writers Josh Ridgway and Kate Wood felt like a movie based on a cheap mystery novel. You know, the ones that come a dime a dozen and aimed at a slightly older audience. That is how this movie came off to me. So I was somewhat disappointed with it not having ghosts.

And I also have to say that the fact that Kelsey Grammer was on the cast list helped to win me over to sit down and watch the movie.

Director Brad Watson didn't really deliver a movie that fell all that much into my liking. Sure, a mystery movie is fine, but not if it feels like one of those cheap crime mysteries that you have tossed at you with the purchase of a weekly magazine. The storyline simply was too stereotypical, generic and predictable. And there weren't much of any suspense or thrills throughout the course of the movie.

Sure, it was fun to watch Nathalie Cox and Kelsey Grammer playing together in a movie again and at the same mansion nonetheless. They worked togethat at the very same location back in 2020 for the Christmas movie titled "Father Christmas". So that was a fun thing to witness, not that it had any influence on the storyline or anything.

The acting performances in the movie were good. But the storyline was just a tad too generic and mundane for my liking.

My rating of "Miss Willoughby and the Haunted Bookshop" lands on a four out of ten stars.

Being an Anglophile, I was thrilled to see that this was filmed in England. I'm a sucker for a British Estate.

Anyway, I am glad I stuck with this. It started out a tad slowly but it held my interest. At first though I didn't even realize that Kelsey was playing the older version of the guardian who took over the young girl's tutelage after her parents' passing. I had to look at the IMDB cast credits to get it straight.

The lead actress playing the adult version (whose parents passed away) had a nice rapport with Kelsey. Her fascination with martial arts classes at the film's outset was confusing though. Apparently, it coincided with her education and interests reflected in the young girl's reading material shown early on.

Overall, it was a tidy little film that I feel could have been bolstered with more suspense and/or thrills to be a true "haunting." Kelsey was the only actor with whom I was familiar but the rest of the cast kept up with him.