Milner plays Edward, a lonely young boy whose parents (David Morrissey and Anne-Marie Duff) have turned their house into a struggling old people's home. Confronted by death and in the presence of the slowly dying, Edward has become fascinated in the paranormal and he keeps a diary of "paranormal happenings", in which he sadly makes daily entries of "no recorded evadense". When a resident dies, Edward recovers his recording equipment from the old man's room so he can listen to his last breaths and try and hear his ghost leaving his body, a practice his father later remarks is "how the Yorkshire Ripper must have started". Edward's morbid fascination with the recently departed is not driven by a desire to kill things but by a need, a desperate need, to know what happens after you die. It is the new resident, retired magician Clarence (Michael Caine), who clashes with Edward over this.
Ordered by the council to move into the home, widower Clarence is deeply unhappy and he and Edward clash immediately. When Edward saves Clarence's life after he tries to kill himself, the two make up. After Edward takes it upon himself to confiscate Clarence's belts, stand watch underneath his window and give him some helpful leaflets (including "Coping with bereavement" and "Information on cervical smears"), the two, helped along by their mutual disdain for the house, become closer. To satiate Edward's desire for contact with the dead, Clarence arranges a seemingly successful seance in the basement, leading Edward to happily write "A MANAFESTATION!" in his diary.
When the two take a trip to an old storage room Clarence owns to pick up some of his old equipment for a performance for Edward's birthday, Clarence gets confused and gets into a minor collision with another vehicle. As the two push the campervan back to the house, Clarence starts to get irritated with Edward's repeated talk of the afterlife. When Clarence says he'd come back as a badger because being a person is a pain in the arse, Edward asks him to come back and see him if he dies, prompting Clarence to tell him, "You don't come back, son! Once they've gone, you can't talk to them!" and laments that he was never able to tell his wife he was sorry before she died, revealing that she divorced him because of his infidelity and confessing that he even missed her funeral. Edward storms off but at his birthday party, the two reconcile and Clarence performs his show, which goes well until he gets confused again and accidentally severs a fellow resident's finger. After his father questions his friendship with Clarence, Edward shouts that he wishes Clarence was his father and plays a recording of his father making sexual advances towards their young helper, Tanya (Linzey Cocker), prompting his parents to separate. After the two take a trip to the graveyard where his ex-wife is buried, the rapidity with which Clarence's dementia is overcoming him becomes clear.
The ending is quite predictable and overall the film does feel like it's going through the motions, but two great performances from Cain and Milner really lift the proceedings. It's a pity that the likes of Leslie Philips and Rosemary Harris are underused, being often little more than background characters, but they are most welcome. Morrissey and Duff are very good as Edward's parents and the film is directed capably by John Crowley, full of touching moments like the scene where Clarence speaks his ex-wife's name into the mirror as the camera focuses one by one on old pictures of the two. Is Anybody There? might not be the most original or ground-breaking drama, but it does what it sets out to do and if you don't raise your expectations too high, you'll have an enjoyable ninety-four minutes.
7 out of 10.
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