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You can see exactly where the concept for this film came from. Someone made a comment about how listening to particular songs can really take you back to a previous time in your life and writer/director Ned Benson clearly went ‘hang on, I’ve got an idea’.

Yep, new Disney+ release Greatest Hits is movie about a woman who when she hears a piece of music, is literally transported back in time to the point when she first heard it. It’s got me thinking about what other common expressions that aren’t quite idioms might lend themselves to new screenplays. Could we see the story of an unsuspecting lodger who is made to acquiesce to all of their landlady’s extreme commands in Netflix’s As Long as You’re Living Under My Roof You’ll Obey My Rules, or a romcom centring on a woman who finds she both needs to stay independent and move in with the man of her dreams called Can’t Live With Him, Can’t Live Without Him. I’ll let you make up your own plot for Does My Bum Look Big in This?.

Still, out of this notion Benson has crafted a really sweet movie. Lucy Boynton’s Harriet is the reluctant traveler finding ways to avoid being sent to the past when she is not ready for it (her body in the present passes out when this happens which can be inconvenient and music plays everywhere), while also choosing to go back at times when she can control it to try and prevent a big bereavement. Her friends want her to live permanently in the present but she is not able to until she then meets someone it might be worth moving on with.

With a huge sense of allegory and metaphor the film uses it sci-fi conceit to examine grief and depression but is ultimately uplifting in an end of Sliding Doors kind of way. It also, given that central idea, has a great soundtrack.

Greatest Hits probably belongs on a streaming service, it does feel too small for cinemas, but it is definitely worth a watch.