British writer-director Jane Gull made a strong impression with her very likable 2016 debut My Feral Heart, about a young carer with Down’s syndrome. This follow-up feature is about a young couple faced with homelessness. Paul (Niall McNamee) is a young Irish guy hoping to make it as a singer-songwriter and playing pubs in London; his manager is his wife, Sophie, played by EastEnders’s Shana Swash. When they are booted out of their flat for non-payment of the exploitatively high rent, the couple head to Southend looking for work and gigs, and things go from bad to worse.
This is a well-intentioned, earnestly acted film, but the tonal shifts are frankly uncomfortable. The brutally grim events in Paul and Sophie’s life are repeatedly leavened with an odd sort of John-Carney-does-poverty dreaminess. And then, looking for casual building-trade work, Paul is effectively kidnapped by gangmasters, kept as slave labour with illegals on building sites and forced to participate in what appear to be tramp fights; he is made to square up to some other poor wretch surrounded by a circle of shaven-headed extras with fists full of cash baying for blood.
Whether or not it is rooted in reality – and it could well be – this is a simply bizarre sequence, although it did remind me of a phrase from the late Martin Amis: “tramp dread”: the combined middle-class fear of homeless people and fear of becoming homeless. Certainly, Love Without Walls wants to focus on a very real and important issue, but the all-important moment when Paul and Sophie lose their tenancy in the flat is dispensed with disconcertingly unreal briskness, as the film favours of slightly strained episodes and soft-edged montages, which sit uncomfortably with the pivot to horror. An uncertain moment for a talented film-maker.
• Love Without Walls is released on 9 June in UK and Irish cinemas.
