Chris Cantrill: Rewilding review – a rural whodunnit told with midlife mirth

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Now a four-time nominee for the Edinburgh comedy award, Chris Cantrill is bearing down on James Acaster’s always-the-bridesmaid record – unless 2026 proves to be his year. Would it be merited? Well, there are few comedians in whose company it is more reliably fun to spend time. And that’s resoundingly the case with Rewilding, the follow-up to 2024’s Easily Swayed, in which Cantrill gave an uproarious account of turning 40, moving to the countryside and having (the male, northern, emotionally stunted equivalent of) a breakdown.

The sequel is scarcely less entertaining, but it’s not as well constructed, and its story is less resonant. It begins with this ebullient Bradford native explaining how bad he is at introducing himself, with reference to “drinks and nibs” his wife has coerced him to attend in their Northumbrian village. Cantrill is chronic at small talk, he tells us, yet adept at code-switching – as demonstrated in the company of the “gen Z girls and gays” who love him, rural workers whose opinions he meekly opposes in the pub, and the private-school boys who (as per one gloriously indiscreet section) call the shots where Cantrill works, on Saturday Night Live UK.

Barely socialised, disintegrating into middle age, wholly reliant on his high-flying wife, the joke is usually on Cantrill here as he introduces us to his fellow villagers on a tour of their territory: the octogenarian WI matron; the grouchy farmer; the blow-in with a video nasty fetish and a heart of gold. There is far more world-building than plot, which doesn’t kick in until chainsaw violence is visited on a local tree, pitching Cantrill into a fictional spin on the outrage that greeted the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree three years ago.

Solving this arboreal whodunnit is very much a case of can see the wood for the trees: you’ll guess the culprit a mile off. And what the tale has to tell us about “community” (Cantrill’s stated subject) isn’t clear. But there’s great fun to be had en route with a comic barking with laughter at his own fish-out-of-water middle-age, and able – bluntly but boisterously – to share that amusement with the rest of us.