Judi Dench's "truly excellent" British drama with "unexpected" twist lands new UK streaming home

Allelujah, a 2022 British drama about a hospital at risk of closure due to NHS cuts, has found itself a new streaming home in the UK. As of this week, it is available to stream with a Prime Video subscription.

Directed by Notes on a Scandal's Richard Eyre and written by Call the Midwife creator Heidi Thomas (based on an Alan Bennett play of the same name), the film boasts an impressive cast.

There's Jennifer Saunders, Russell Tovey, David Bradley, Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, and Bally Gill.

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Set in the Bethlehem hospital, also known as 'The Beth', the plot follows the staff who work there as a local television crew decide to make a documentary about the efforts to save it from shutting down.

While it sounds like your typical light-hearted film where the hospital gets saved at the last minute, it's really not.

We won't go into spoilers here, but there's a big twist in the middle that makes this film a lot more serious than you might expect.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that shock twist has led to the film having quite a divisive response, sitting at an average score of 6/10 on IMDb from over 2,000 user ratings.

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"That twist, oh my days, I didn't see that coming at all, talk about unexpected," wrote one fan, who thought that it made for "a truly excellent movie".

Another review said of the "love it or hate it" third act: "If the film wasn't spoiled for me by a group of people talking about the previous screening, this would be as surprising as The Sixth Sense or Se7en. The third act of this film is that bat s*** crazy, it actually defies belief."

A less impressed viewer called the twist "a hand grenade in derailing all expectations" that "seemed totally unsatisfactory in the context of the rest of the film".

Allelujah is available to now on Prime Video.

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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he's covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish.