THE credits closing The Happy Prince, which is the passion project and directorial debut of star Rupert Everett, are deeply telling.

This is the story of the final years in the life of Irish poet, playwright and satirist Oscar Wilde. Not only is Everett’s film bolstered by more than 20 production companies but it has a dozen executive producers. Wilde may have gifted the world an abundance of enduring culture but the difficult final years of his life remain resistant to financing.

Wilde’s career soared and plummeted within only a few years. One minute he was the toast of high society, the next incarcerated for his homosexuality and relationship with Bosie, son of, Marquess of Queensberry, John Douglas.

The film finds Wilde exiled in Paris, dishevelled and without a penny to his name. How could it be that the writer of such classics as The Importance of Being Earnest had been reduced to this? As it transpires, it is as much to do with the audacity of Wilde himself as the intolerant society around him.

Everett’s struggle to see his Happy Prince produced was worth the effort. After Stephen Fry, who took the role in 1995, it is hard to think of an actor more primed to play the Irish poet and playwright than he.

Indeed, The Happy Prince marks a reprisal for the actor, who last played Wilde on stage in Neil Armfield’s 2012 stage revival of The Judas Kiss. This new outing treads a familiar path to that play, honing in on Wilde’s destructive relationship with Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas (Colin Morgan). Emily Watson is frustratingly peripheral as the writer’s disconsolate wife Constance, whilst Edwin Thomas makes for an emphatic Robbie Ross, the lover who should have been.

All revolve around Wilde’s true protégé, which is to say himself. Layered in prosthetic plush and rouge, Everett turns out many varieties of his bumptious façade throughout the length of his film, most predominantly flirting between a triptych of Wilde’s celebrity heyday, imprisonment and later degradation. He is a languid and elegiac figure, demanding sympathy - a closing title reminds that Wilde only received a ‘pardon’ for his homosexuality last year - and exasperation by equal measure.

Also out this week is Hereditary, a new horror film that has managed to shake audiences to their core. It’s not pleasant but, for genre fans, it is 2018’s must see feature of the year.

- Toby Symonds