There is something wonderfully counter-cultural about the Harry Potter series. Mainstream mass entertainment product is increasingly aimed at people whose faculties of concentration and memory have been dulled by the sensational junk they have already consumed. But the Potter films, like J K Rowling's books on which they are based, have gone in the opposite direction. They get longer, slower and more complex (and therefore duller for non-believers), and expect ever more knowledge and effort from their audience.
That the franchise is now seven films long, and will reach eight when the final episode comes out next year, shows that treating even young people with respect for their intelligence can be a money-making proposition - perhaps a startling notion for an industry that prefers to underestimate the public.
As the original audience has grown older, so have the characters, and with them the sense that the world may not be a place of happy endings. But the thing that makes this seventh episode unique is that Hogwarts does not appear in it at all. For most of the film Harry, Ron and Hermione are on the run, sometimes in the countryside, sometimes in the now threatened "muggle" world, and at one point inside the Ministry of Magic, which has a decidedly fascist feel.
It is not clear if director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves realised the risk they were taking by having the three main characters drop out of school and leave its familiar, if unsafe grounds. The glorious Gothic boarding academy is a character itself, and the source of much of the films' charm. You miss it here. In its stead are some beautiful British rural locations - desolate beaches and wintry forests - where the three main characters find themselves as they flee the agents of the Dark Lord and search for the "Horcruxes", the magical devices that hold the key to his destruction.
