Sam Neill's best performance

It is never right to reduce an actor to a single role, but Sam Neill (who died last week) will always be about one little known film from 2008 I saw a while ago, in terrible quality, on a small computer screen. And yet it remains one of the most special cinematic experiences in my life.  

Dean Spanley is that rare combination of charming and bizarre that, if done properly, will always leave a mark. The film is billed as "a surreal period comedic tale of canine reincarnation exploring the relationships between father and son and master and dog". And it is all that, too. Sam Neill plays a clergyman who has a weakness for Hungarian Imperial Tokay wine. Weakness, though, does not even begin to cover it. For when Dean Spanley drinks the wine (slowly, meditatively, with tiny sips), he starts to relive memories from his previous life. During which he was... a Welsh Spaniel. 

There are moments in the films where the plot gets so eccentric it really should fall apart. But it doesn't. Instead, it inhabits its own strange world so comfortably, with such disarming commitment, that you simply get lost in its atmosphere. And at the heart of it all is Sam Neill who is clearly relishing the wine and the canine memories (both funny and sad). Relishing the role. When he is saying that you can't commit a bigger crime than to drag your dog from a lamppost with its complex mixture of odours... As a dog owner, this goes right through my heart. 

As does this story, and this film. Dean Spanley is the epitome of 'special', like so many other brilliant but unflashy works of art I have discovered over the years (Good Things by Epic Soundtracks, Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard). It gets inside you and it stays there. It evokes something you never knew could be evoked. And it is all done through the absolutely magical performance of Sam Neill. The way he closes his eyes when he drinks Tokay... You wish you could taste just one sip of that, and God only knows what memories would follow.