The Good Night thrives off a simple idea: how many of us living faithfully with a partner have found ourselves in a dream, fraternizing with someone else? The funniest part being that when you wake up and see your loved one, you know during the night you've had a one-night stand.

In The Good Night, writer-director Jake Paltrow's screen debut, The Office's Martin Freeman plays Gary, a thirtysomething with a career heading down the tubes. He's a fading pop musician, making boring commercial jingles, in a relationship with plain Jane girlfriend Dora (Jake's sister Gwyneth), which has lost its spark. He's the wrong side of 30, and whilst his bezzy mate Paul (Pegg) is going great guns, for Gary, life sucks.

That is, until he dreams one night of Penelope Cruz playing a particularly fetching Anna, who is ready to satisfy Gary's every need. Of course, you have to suspend belief, a) that Cruz has fallen for him and b) that Gary manages to see Anna in recurrent dreams, to the point where he prefers his sleeping state to the real one. He then seeks to make sense of it all and comes across a dream guru (Danny De Vito). Will Gary be able to differentiate between fantasy and reality? Will Dora stick around? Will Anna continue to be Gary's dream girl?

The Good Night just about manages to find enough mileage to justify its 114-minute length as a mildly amusing comedy drama. Ultimately, you wish there were 1 or 2 more laughs, but Martin Freeman does his best to bring out the humour and confusion in the lead character, whilst Cruz is convincing as the object of his desires and Paltrow reasonable as the long-suffering girlfriend. Whilst it feels like a short film expanded to feature film length, it benefits from its eye-catching cast and engaging story. I suspect many people may have had a secret illicit dream at some point in their lives.