Sundance 2026 Review: FING!, Roald Dahl-Inspired Fantasy for the Whole Family
Mia Wasikowska, Blake Harrison, and Taika Waititi star in director Jeffrey Walker's film.
Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Witches) may be long gone -- he passed away in 1990 -- but what’s left of his spirit lives on in Fing!, a family-oriented fantasy-adventure that would make said unearthly spirit proud of the result, directed by Jeffrey Walker from an adaptation written by Kevin Cecil and David Walliams from the latter’s 2019 children’s book.
Fing! centers on the Meek family, Maureen (Mia Wasikowska), Christopher Meek (Blake Harrison), both junior librarians, and their incorrigible preteen daughter, Myrtle (Iona Bell). Myrtle, it seems, never grew up out of the “terrible twos.” She’s utterly spoiled, utterly selfish, and utterly unbearable, the product of her parents' well-meaning over-indulgence. Save for an age-appropriate, Meatloaf-loving neighborhood boy, Tyler (Sidhant Anand), Myrtle doesn’t have any friends, neither at school nor elsewhere.
In an obvious parallel to Myrtle's story, The Viscount (Taika Waititi) lives in a mansion overlooking a wildlife park (don’t call it a “zoo”). In his 40s and, like Myrtle, he was over-indulged by his Nanny (Penelope Wilton) over the decades to the point where he can’t dress or feed himself without her help. Despite his lofty title and mansion, he’s also a cool £ 17 million in debt to a local bank, and the bank president, Mr. Dour (Richard Roxburgh), has started to become impatient.
Living free of real-world consequences connects Myrtle and The Viscount, but only one character gets a redemption arc, and it’s not The Viscount. Spoiler: It’s Myrtle, but only after her parents, still refusing to see the obvious errors of their ways, acquiesce to her demands to find and retrieve the magical creature of the title, a one-eyed, limbless ball of red hair with a nasty temperament and a weakness for custard cream-flavored biscuits.
Squarely aimed at children and their families, Fing! turns subtext into text and Myrtle and Fing into reflections of each other, down to the red hair and ornery temperaments. But where The Viscount, upon learning of the Fing’s existence, wants to acquire it for his wildlife park, Myrtle begins to see not just a kindred spirit, but a kindred spirit worth saving from the rapacious excesses of an upper-class twit like The Viscount.
Designed with an emphasis on color, texture, and a hyper-stylized appearance, Fing! delivers enough visual variety to engage even the most easily distracted preteen or their parents. The often dry, droll, deadpan humor remains both consistent and consistently funny throughout, easily accessible and just as easily understandable for all ages, a minor triumph of the adaptation and Walker’s perfectly calibrated direction.
If Fing! has any issues, it’s in making Myrtle not just unlikable, but almost too unlikable until the obligatory redemption beats take over and propel the story into its preordained conclusion. Fing’s appearance could have used a keener sense of creature design and a few more renders to ensure it fit in properly within live-action plates.
Overall, though, those are minor quibbles when compared to the near flawless execution of the other visual and narrative elements in Fing!
Fing! premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
Fing!
Director(s)
- Jeffrey Walker
Writer(s)
- Kevin Cecil
- David Walliams
Cast
- Taika Waititi
- Penelope Wilton
- Richard Roxburgh
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