Harry Wootliff is the film-maker who in 2018 gave us the wonderfully tender and well-observed grownup love story Only You with Josh O’Connor and Laia Costa. Now she is back with another complex relationship, a humidly intense tale of amour fou, submission and emotional self-harm, adapted from Deborah Kay Davies’s novel True Things About Me. This is a well-acted movie with accomplished set-piece scenes of eroticism and residual, unfulfilled yearning. But sometimes it feels like the ambient atmosphere and performances are going nowhere. The characterisation isn’t as complex or as searching as it was in Only You, and in its third act the plot signs off with a lame and implausible resolution.
The scene is a benefits office in a seaside town, where Kate (Ruth Wilson) has the boring task of interviewing all the variously upset and abusive claimants. Her mate Alison (Hayley Squires) has stuck her neck out to get her this job, and is already slightly worried and exasperated by Kate’s persistent lateness and not-very-well-concealed sarky attitude.
