There is a particular exhaustion that settles over an audience when a climate documentary begins, because so many of them have been content to simply catalogue catastrophe and leave the viewer to drown quietly in their own guilt. Fredi Devas's new film, presented by Benedict Cumberbatch against the grand Victorian stonework of London's Natural History Museum, makes a deliberate and refreshing choice to refuse that tradition. Assembled from the voices and testimonies of a range of contributors across the globe, it asks not what has been lost, but what, precisely, might still be saved — and by whom. The film moves across several continents with genuine curiosity.

In South Korea, a forest healing instructor leads clients through woodland spaces that are used, quite seriously, as sites of psychological therapy — an idea that might invite easy mockery, yet which is harder to dismiss once one considers how consistently natural environments have been shown to restore a fatigued human mind. In Singapore, naturalist and broadcaster Dan O'Neill, visiting a city more associated with strict governance than ecological ambition, finds something unexpectedly admirable: a systematic, municipal commitment to weaving green space into the very architecture of urban life. The film also revisits the charged question of meat consumption, which is connected to land clearance on a scale that is genuinely difficult to comprehend. Rather than prosecuting carnivores, however, it chooses a more patient register, noting that plant-based alternatives — including mycelium-derived products — have not yet reached the quality needed to displace meat, but that the science is advancing with quiet determination.

Where the film is most vulnerable to criticism is in its tone, which occasionally drifts toward the uplifting cadences of a schools broadcast, complete with a score that rises instructively whenever hope is required.