John Goldschmidt's Dough is a stoner comedy without any stoners, which is oddly appropriate considering its themes of blending cultures. Nat (Jonathan Pryce) is a Hasidic widower who runs a kosher London bakery and is quite set in his ways, even though he's been losing both customers and employees to the big shiny supermarket chain run by the villainous Sam Cotton (Philip Davis). Necessity requires Nat to hire immigrant Muslim teenager Ayyash (Jerome Holder), who deals grass on the side to help his mother (Natasha Gordon) make ends meet, and Nat finds his business unexpectedly booming when Ayyash accidentally drops his diggity-diggity-dank into the dough. While the notion that Nat would be able to sell pot-infused challah strong enough to get the attendees at a Shabbos dinner baked without anyone, including himself, figuring it out doesn't quite overcome suspension of disbelief, it's less important than the father-son relationship that grows between Nat and the sweet-natured Ayyash — particularly as they discover that they're devoted to their religious rituals in ways that are mystifying to the secular world, but not to each other. Jonathan Pryce is always great, but Jerome Holder is a real find, displaying a charisma reminiscent of the similarly unknown John Boyega in Attack the Block. Hopefully Holder has a similarly high-profile career in his future.
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