Sorry Kate Winslet, but you can’t just do this to me. I sat down to watch the Oscar winner and queen of Reading star in I Am Ruth, and, two hours later… I’m a broken woman. In Channel 4’s feature-length drama, Winslet plays a mother wracked with worry as her daughter’s mental health disintegrates. What destroyed me wasn’t the way Ruth fulsomely swears out loud when she’s alone in the car, nor how she scuttles into the garden to smoke a secret ciggie when completely exasperated. No, it was the way her voice is always just a little bit too high, hanging on by a thread, cheeriness hiding desperation – she exists, instinctively, to gee up everyone else.
As is the way with Dominic Savage’s female-led I Am anthology series, the story has been devised alongside Winslet herself, and the action is all improvised. That sense of fly-on-the-wall naturalism is further heightened by the fact Winslet acts opposite her own real-life daughter, Mia Threapleton. Together, the pair have a special alchemy: there’s so much in their hostile silences, such yearning in their quiet cuddles.
Savage’s films often get described as acting “masterclasses”. They’re sophisticated character studies, with conversation-starting issues at their heart: Vicky McClure’s I Am Nicola was about a coercive relationship, Suranne Jones’s I Am Victoria about a woman struggling with anxiety. Here, there is little plot, other than the fact that Freya is spending a lot of time in her bedroom with the curtains closed, trying to take the perfect selfie, notifications pinging through the night. Her mum comes in, opens the windows, and complains that it’s stuffy. Hanging about like a miasma is the feeling that something bad is happening.
Even so, by the end, I felt as though I was watching a thriller. Things simmer, then boil over into white fury. The pair rage at each other, not knowing how to stop, and there’s a horrible, urgent feeling that Freya is sinking. She can’t articulate why she’s so sad; Ruth, parenting alone, is doing a lot of supporting but has no one to support her. (At one point, she rings her freshers’ student son and bursts into tears.)
As Freya, Threapleton is a real revelation. One moment, she’s like a wobbily limbed calf, retreating under her duvet. The next, she’s a silent assassin, brooding in the corner before viciously dismantling her mum’s choice of outfit. Winslet’s wrenching performance is similarly unshowy. At home, her ears prick up, alert for sounds of life, while at work, she discreetly falls apart in front of a spreadsheet. She treads on eggshells, before exhaustedly letting her guard down. “I can do some things I want to do sometimes, as well!” she snaps petulantly when Freya catches her smoking.
Aside from its two superlative performances, I Am Ruth should start a more considered conversation about teenagers and social media. There’s always been a patronising idea that kids + screens = bad. But we need to be more nuanced about it. For Ruth, there’s a tricky question about boundaries. Freya’s smartphone is her private domain, but there are things happening within it that she really needs to be protected from. For many parents with teenage kids, this will be essential viewing. For some, though, it may be simply too agonising.
