GROW - Mark Reviews Movies

Grow, Fathom Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 16, 2025

The tone of Grow bounces between silly and sincere, which is mostly to say that the movie doesn't take either its humor or its matters of the heart seriously. There's probably a funny, joke-a-minute comedy or a warm tale about lonely people finding each other out of this material, but the movie we get here is one filled with half measures.

It revolves around a girl named Charlie (Priya-Rose Brookwell), who lives in a children's home after her mother, an aspiring actress, left the girl to pursue her career. She's a plucky kid, desperate to find and reunite with her mom, and often gets into trouble, such as when the police have to return her to the facility after Charlie attempts to sneak onto a bus heading out of town.

Back at the home, a social worker reveals that they have found, not the girl's mother, but a maternal aunt, The aunt, named Dinah (Golda Rosheuvel), will bring Charlie to her farm near the small Scottish town of Mugford, the self-proclaimed "pumpkin capital of the world."

In addition to her precocious and rebellious nature, Charlie has a secret talent. She can feel what plants feel. After touching some flowers in the shade at the farm, she can tell, for example, that the plant needs some time in the sun, and while trying to spray pesticide under the shaky guidance of farmhand Boris (Joe Wilkinson), Charlie has trouble breathing. It's not because the chemical's affecting her directly, but on account of how it's choking the plants themselves.

That makes for a nice fantasy touch to the screenplay by Nick Guthe, Ruth Flecther Gage, and Christos N. Gage, although most of this story ends up being grounded within the realm of goofy comedic bits and an approach toward sentimentality that it never quite achieves. The plot has Charlie, who reconsiders running away from the farm after her aunt tells her that no one is forcing her to live here but that she hopes the girl will stay, learning about the town's annual pumpkin competition. If someone can grow a pumpkin that weighs a literal metric ton, that contestant wins £100,000. With that kind of money, Charlie could find her mother with no trouble at all.

Despite the brightly chipper quality brought to the material by director John McPhail, this is quite a melancholy story at its core—about a girl who just wants her mother and a farmer whose life's work is in financial jeopardy for reasons she can't understand. That might be why the broad humor feels so jarring, as well as why the movie's focus on the relationship between Charlie and Dinah comes across as hollow. These characters don't exist to have any real depth or development, except as far as those qualities can fit within a formulaic tale.

The formula, then, is all about Charlie and Dinah trying the grow the largest, heaviest pumpkin Mugford has ever seen. They get help from Arlo (Nick Frost), who lives alone—but in an acceptable way for the movie, since the guy is entirely comedic relief—and is only person in the village to defeat the otherwise reigning champions of the competition.

They're a couple of stuck-up nobles (played by Tim McInnerny and Jane Horrocks), who make up some of the half-hearted cast of supporting players in the background. Another is the head scientist (played by Jeremy Swift), also the father of Charlie's only friend in town Oliver (Dominic McLaughlin), at an agricultural corporation that's trying to grow the perfect pumpkin without nature. Once the scientist discovers that Charlie's connection to plants is authentic, he starts having his lab assistant do some silly things—like dancing for the pumpkin or talking to it, in a way that comes across as cheesy pick-up lines—to encourage the specimen to grow.

There are some inspired turns and bits here, particularly the appearance of a pumpkin killer, someone in a hooded jacket and wielding a very sharp knife, who goes around sabotaging the contestants. The gag is that the butcher re-creates a couple of famous movie deaths, with orange-colored juice replacing the black-and-white blood swirling down a drain or the red stuff when someone finds a mutilated pumpkin under his golden sheets. Such references will go over the heads of kids in the audience, obviously, but that, along with the fact that the innocent carnage of the sequence is such a shock within the context of the otherwise eager-to-please material, is why it is genuinely funny.

Otherwise, the movie is aimed directly and almost exclusively at the younger members of the audience. That's not an inherent detriment for any movie, of course, but Grow doesn't seem to trust that kids can handle jokes beyond ridiculous stuff, characters who are more than empty shells or comic relief, and a story that is as fundamentally sad as this one can be.

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