Male voice choirs singing in the streets are a tired Welsh clich�

She gets her chance when her father, a widower and amateur opera singer, who uses Annie Mary as a human doormat, falls ill.

She has the opportunity to find herself through the circumstances which provide the film's sub plot, in which the villagers are raising money to send Annie Mary's sick young friend Bethan to Disneyland.

The film has some of the ingredients of the offbeat comedy it clearly wants to be.

But its main trouble is simply its remorseless quirkiness, which seems afraid to let scarcely any of the characters be anything less than full-on eccentrics, all the time.

The effect is to distance rather than to engage the audience.

Another problem is that its use of valleys images - sheep, male voice choirs singing in the streets, brass bands, chapels - is so cliched and so overdone that it makes Under Milk Wood look like an access documentary.

The film's few gestures to contemporaneity only serve to underline how painfully dated are the stereotypes on which it relies for its largely farcical humour.

Worse, Annie Mary's character is so bizarre, so overacted, and her motives so unclear, that the viewer's sympathies are fatally alienated, and when the film reaches its would-be poignant conclusion, it has forfeited its claim on the emotions.

Very Annie-Mary is on at selected London cinemas from 25 May and on general release from 8 June.