Played out in nursing homes and at bedsides, death’s endgame generally follows a fairly predictable path in film, especially when the dying has a young protégée to inspire. In Is Anyone There?, directed by John Crowley (Boy A), the young Edward, played by Son of Rambow’s Bill Milner, is forced to live in a house that has been converted into an ersatz nursing home, and whose latest resident, Clarence (Michael Caine), carries both his grief and a literal bag of magic tricks.

Writer Peter Harness’s roots in television are evident in the film’s first two acts, as its lurching series of establishing scenes paint characters like Edward, a morbid would-be-paranormalist, in broad, unsympathetic strokes. Somewhere in these scenes we’re meant to empathize with a variety of trapped characters, and to see a burgeoning friendship in Clarence and Edward’s initial antagonism, but it’s easy to get lost in the bland beige of 1980s England.

In fact, with the exception of an inventive “device” that allows retroactive scenes to be reviewed vicariously through Edward’s tape recorder — his instrument for observing the residents’ deaths — Is Anyone There? shows all the signs of a familiar story of misery overcome by life-affirming relationships. But there’s life in this dying story yet.

The segue into Edward and Clarence’s relationship might be as subtle as the twinkling soundtrack that lets us know they’ve warmed to each other, but Caine still finds a genuinely endearing chemistry with Milner in their relatively brief friendship. Clarence’s inevitable disintegration adds a striking dimension to their relationship, and is played with a truthfulness that offers a welcome depth. What’s more, despite a nursing home filled with characters like a man fixated on a single phrase and a former dancer with a plastic leg, Harness manages to reign in the impulse to fixate on their quirks, instead offering brief, telling glimpses throughout the film. Instead, the film’s humour is nicely understated, as when Edward, a death-obsessed child trapped in the company of dying residents, complains nostalgically that he used to have a bedroom with Paddington Bear wallpaper.

Though the film struggles as much with its opening and closing acts as its characters do with their beginnings and endings, between Caine’s considerable charm and some gratifyingly subversive inversions of the expected, exultant end, Is Anyone There? has plenty of life.