Film Review: THE MAGIC FARAWAY TREE (2026): This Offbeat Family Film Has its Heart in the Right Place

The Magic Faraway Tree Review

The Magic Faraway Tree (2026) Film Review, a movie directed by Ben Gregor, written by Simon Farnaby and Enid Blyton and starring Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Nonzo Anozie, Phoenix Laroche, Billie Gadson, Delilah Bennett–Cardy, Nicola Coughlan, Simon Farnaby, Claire Keelan, Hiran Abeysekera, Dustin Demri–Burns, Jessica Gunning, Oliver Chris, Rebecca Ferguson, Jennifer Saunders and Judi Dench.

Filmmaker Ben Gregor’s watchable fantasy, The Magic Faraway Tree, is, perhaps, the summer’s most well-meaning family film. In it, parents, Tim (Andrew Garfield) and Polly (Claire Foy) Thompson, have three kids (played by Phoenix Laroche, Billie Gadson and Delilah Bennett-Cardy). Tim is a motivated stay-at-home dad while Polly decides to leave her job due to her disagreement with her company’s inventions, which include a surveillance camera of sorts in their home refrigerator.

Family dynamics play a big part in the film, and despite the best of intentions, the movie never really finds its footing, and occasionally feels a bit uneven. It is sometimes flat at times, as well. Still, there is a lot of heart in the movie that almost saves the picture, and makes it a moderately charming little tale, even if it could have been so much more than it winds up being.

In the plot, Tim, Polly and the kids move to the countryside where there is an odd place that they are going to stay in. In that home (which is a less than glorified barn), there are spider webs all over, and things are starting to look like they may become worse for the family than they already were.

Enter a fairy called Silky (a well-cast Nicola Coughlan), who alongside Angry Pixie (Hiran Abeysekera), returns one of the Thompson clan’s good deeds. You see, Fran (Gadson), the youngest daughter who doesn’t seem to speak at first, gives Silky her purse back, thus helping to start-up a bond between the child and the magical fairy. Fran loves fairies and that is her most charming trait.

One of the film’s creators, Simon Farnaby, has a clever role in the picture as a neighbor and there’s a hilarious distinction between Wi-Fi and “wifey,” the term for a man’s significant other.

Alas, there is a magical tree that Fran is instructed to visit, and the courageous Fran travels through the trees to get to it. Meanwhile, her older sister, Beth (Bennett-Cardy), is mortified that the new place she is staying in has no Wi-Fi or no electricity. Soon, the magical tree leads to a place that is offering candy or wishes to the kids, depending on the theme of that particular day. Thus, the brother Joe, (Laroche), could turn into a video game character if he so chooses.

A lot happens in The Magic Faraway Tree, but the film is overstuffed with characters like Nonso Anozie’s memorable, Moonface and Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning). They’re charming although there are so many characters, some of them get lost in the shuffle. However, it all feels a bit underwhelming in the grand scheme of things.

One of the characters is tricked by another. There is the need to reverse a wish which was placed, and so on and so forth. It feels like the characters create their own problems, and, many times, it’s all their fault they’re in the situations they’re in, which often makes it hard to feel sympathetic to them at key intervals in the picture. 

That being said, Jennifer Saunders steals the movie as the kids’ grandma, who wants the children’s parents to straighten up and fly right, so to speak. Saunders is appropriately humorous as the overbearing parent/grandparent, and she lights up the screen through her mannerisms and selfish demeanor, which is often fun to watch on-screen.

Rebecca Ferguson also makes a zesty last minute appearance as Dame Snap, who acts as a baddie in a story that needed more plot development in-between the chuckles the movie creates to keep the kids in the theater consistently smiling.

Garfield and Foy try to make it work, but, perhaps, not hard enough. Foy looks like she’s struggling to remain invested in the material at times, while Garfield seems to be making it all up as he goes along. That’s not the cast’s fault per se, but the performances could have been better from these two heavy-hitting performers. While the kid actors are perfectly fine, the movie merges too many elements together, and the result is entertaining in moderation, even if the movie is instantly forgettable once the closing credits arrive.

The Magic Faraway Tree has a big heart and that is its saving grace. It’s hard to root against a struggling family, especially one in which a member of it roots against the parents’ success by making a poorly thought-out wish. There’s a dysfunctional aspect to the family dynamics, which makes the film play a lot more concerning than it should have. Love holds this family together, but they make bad choices collectively as a family, which makes it an odd, peculiar dynamic within the film.

In the end, younger children may laugh at the colorful characters in The Magic Faraway Tree and that will take their minds out of the movie’s more depressing aspects. It’s a close call, but this film is not highly recommended. It does have elements that could grow on the viewer with repeated viewings, though.

Rating: 6.5/10

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