This bleak, stark debut feature from writer-director Leo Leigh bears the obvious influences of his parents Mike Leigh and Alison Steadman; it has a barbed cartoony unhappiness, a depiction of its characters verging on caricature and misanthropy but not quite, and the notes of redemption offered at the end are ambiguous. It is not a theatre of cruelty so much as a theatre of mockery; a world where a lot of the time absurd people are laughing at the absurdity of others, partly – but not wholly – because of how unhappy they are.
Leigh allows us to see how the tonal sourness challenges the adjective in the title. Maggie O’Neill plays Sue, a woman who runs a (depressing) children’s party shop hiring out balloons and banners, and she likes red wine. Her relationship breaks up and at the funeral of her brother, a keen biker whose corpse is carried in an engagingly surreal sidecar-hearse, Sue defiantly gets flirtatious with Ron (Tony Pitts), one of the biker mourners. Ron is a great big macho bear of a guy who turns out to be divorced, with a son Anthony (Harry Trevaldwyn) who is an exquisite queer butterfly: a dancer, a social media YouTuber and a narcissist in a dysfunctional relationship with a doting sugar-daddy figure (Jeff Rawle) who isn’t getting much or any sex out of it.
