A Fantastic Fear of Everything is about a writer who is trying to escape his children’s book persona by becoming a writer about Victorian era serial killers, but instead of success, he becomes pathologically unable to cope with the real world and faces every challenge as if it is life threatening. Simon Pegg, whom I adore, stars in A Fantastic Fear of Everything, but even Pegg’s reliable talent and charm and the film’s ambitious genre-bending narrative failed to elicit a chuckle from me.
If you can pick up the clues, A Fantastic Fear of Everything provides some tantalizing hints about the denouement such as serial killers and writers are brothers. A Fantastic Fear of Everything can be clever, but the humor is like a Saturday Night Live skit that has gone on too long: at some point it was funny, but someone was too self-indulgent to know which part it was and did not edit appropriately. A Fantastic Fear of Everything’s first half so defies convention and played broadly, and the tonal shift in the narrative is so dramatic that when the formulaic aspect kicks in, it is a relief, not a disappointment. A Fantastic Fear of Everything’s music and nostalgic bits are the funniest aspects of the film, and the one relationship that did not feel cinematically contrived was his relationship with his agent.
A Fantastic Fear of Everything wants to be an Edgar Wright film, but it isn’t. A Fantastic Fear of Everything attempts to make a pathological dysfunctional phobia hilarious, but instead I found it annoying like a 70s sitcom comedy of manners where miscommunication and assumption leads to shenanigans. If you love Pegg, which I do, nothing that I write will keep you away from A Fantastic Fear of Everything, but you should not waste your time on this ambitious, but flat comedy.