By The Grace Of God

This is a tiresome movie, squeezing a 15-minute story into an intolerable 37 minutes. Juergen, a German man, believes he was swapped at birth with Prince Charles and that the Queen is his mother.

He suffers from the Royal Disease, haemophilia. He believes that because of his poor health, he was switched with a baby of non-royal blood. We follow Juergen on his plot to see the Queen and demonstrate his true descent. But there are about 15 layers of protocol between the public and Her Majesty. That, and Juergen doesn't quite have all his brain-cells firing at the best of times. He writes to various officials, and goes for a job interview for a role at the Royal Household - all to little avail. The media are either a bunch of snakes ("You have no vision," hisses Juergen), or cynical about proof.

By The Grace Of God is fiction, but it is shot in a faux-documentary style. It mixes Hi8, Minima, Super 16 and Mini DV footage, to no particularly interesting stylistic effect, and does nothing but distract the viewer. It also has pained straight-to-camera confessionals, along with excruciatingly slow storytelling. "Once in a while, you feel you have to change your life."

It's a dull, uninteresting film, but its greatest sin of all is that it wastes the first movement of the Glorious Ninth.