I Swear
Kirk Jones (2025)
John Davidson was born in the early 1970s in Galashiels, developed serious Tourette syndrome in pre-adolescence and has suffered from it ever since. For much of his adult life, he has publicly campaigned for greater recognition and understanding of the condition. I avoided I Swear on its release in British cinemas last autumn. The trailer for writer-director Kirk Jones’ dramatisation of Davidson’s life not only suggested a formula film but seemed to tell the story of his tribulations and tenacity in the space of two minutes. After receiving excellent reviews, I Swear grabbed all the headlines at last month’s BAFTA ceremony for two reasons, one happier than the other. When the film began streaming on Netflix a couple of weeks later, I decided to try it.
‘The problem is not Tourette’s,’ says the film’s John Davidson, ‘the problem is that people don’t know enough about Tourette’s’. I was one of those people at the start of Kirk Jones’ story and probably still am, but I Swear is educational as well as humanly absorbing. You hesitate to call such a distressing condition fascinating but that fairly describes the verbal tic of coprolalia. According to Wikipedia, around 10% of Tourette’s sufferers exhibit coprolalia, ie ‘the involuntary utterance of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks’; as everyone who watched the recent BAFTAs on television knows, John Davidson is among the 10%. The words he was heard calling out at the ceremony were racially abusive. Quite a few of us, assuming these outbursts resulted from brief loss of control of his self-censoring equipment, were dismayed to think they expressed Davidson’s real feelings about those at whom he shouted.
Google’s AI Overview explains that, like the involuntary physical movements that are more commonly part of Tourette’s, coprolalia is a neurobiological tic, ‘caused by “faulty wiring” in the brain’s inhibitory mechanisms’. Watching I Swear is a better way, though, of understanding that John’s coprolalia isn’t a matter of blurting out what he truly feels – as when, to take one of many examples, he’s interviewed for a job assisting Tommy Trotter (Peter Mullan), caretaker at the local community centre, Tommy asks if John can make a decent cup of tea and he replies, ‘Oh aye, I’m good at tea – I use spunk for milk’. After hearing his coprolalia in action for the best part of the film’s two hours, it’s hard not to see it as, in two ways, phenomenal. The words John unintentionally comes out with aren’t what he wants to say yet they’re not random either – as ‘spunk for milk’ illustrates, they relate significantly to the situation he’s in. These momentary verbal eruptions sometimes come so thick and fast they’re discombobulating, sending you on your own flights of fancy – wondering if coprolalia reflects a basic human impulse to be subversive or self-destructive. John sums up the problem more simply: ‘I say things that I shouldn’t’.
In I Swear’s prologue, it’s 2019 and John is at Holyrood Palace to receive an MBE from Queen Elizabeth. He’s worried about even sitting in the hall, scared he’ll soon say a word out of place – persuaded to take his seat, he promptly does. Kirk Jones then flashes back to 1983, where John (Scott Ellis Watson at this stage) has a paper round and is about to start secondary school in Galashiels: we see him with his mother Heather (Shirley Henderson), going to buy his new school uniform. He’s a highly promising goalkeeper and his father (Steven Cree) arranges for a talent scout to come to the school to watch John in a football match. It’s around this time that he starts developing serious Tourette’s symptoms (later than the average onset age) – stiff neck, head twitching, spasms of anti-social behaviour both physical and verbal. After one such episode, the headmaster (Ron Donachie) whips John’s hand with a belt, enough to prevent his using it in goal; this, in combination with the tics, guarantees a disastrous performance for the talent scout, which infuriates his father. At home, John spits out food at the dinner table. His parents’ relationship is already strained and Kirk Jones uses the advent of John’s condition as the nail in the marriage’s coffin. His father walks out, leaving Heather, who works as a hospital nurse, alone to look after John and his three younger siblings. Derided at school and isolated within the family, John tries and fails to drown himself, after which the narrative jumps forward to 1996. In his mid-twenties, John (Robert Aramayo) is unemployed and still living with his mother, but not for much longer.
The next part of the narrative is typical of the film’s rough-and-ready script. John bumps into Murray Achenbach (Francesco Piacentini-Smith), a friend from schooldays who emigrated to Australia but has recently returned home because his mother is terminally ill with liver cancer. Murray invites John back to his house for a meal, John daren’t accept but Murray’s mother Dottie (Maxine Peake) insists, undaunted by John’s coprolalic greeting. She’s soon telling him it’s a family rule that ‘You never have to apologise in this house’. A few screen minutes later, John has told Heather that he’s moving in with the Achenbachs, and he does. Dottie’s husband (David Carlyle) is worried she won’t be able to cope, given her own medical condition. His indomitable wife, a mental health nurse, takes it all in her stride – even when, for example, during a supermarket visit, John involuntarily smacks her in the face. Dottie weans John off the anti-psychotic medication he has long been prescribed but a visit with Murray to a night club ends disastrously: John’s ticcing leads to a brawl, a night in police custody and an assault charge. Dottie cheers him up by arranging the interview at the community centre. Despite John’s outbursts, Tommy Trotter gives him the job.
You understand why freedom of speech at the Achenbachs’ must have made them a dream family to John Davidson and loving, resourceful Dottie more than a second mother to him. At this stage of I Swear, though, I couldn’t help thinking she was too good to be true, not least because Dottie’s illness was shaping up as a familiar strain of screen cancer, asymptomatic and painless. I also wondered if John’s own mother wasn’t being short-changed in the storytelling. There’s soon an answer to the first objection: it really was the case, as the film reveals, that Dottie Achenbach had been misdiagnosed with cancer, that a growth in her liver was benign. But I Swear’s portrait of John’s estranged family, and his mother in particular, continues to nag throughout.
Kirk Jones, presumably in consultation with John Davidson, probably meant to respect the feelings of people still alive and felt that a least-said-soonest-mended approach made sense, but he doesn’t ignore the Davidson family entirely, not at least once the narrative has eventually returned to its starting point of the MBE investiture and moved forward from there. Dottie is by John’s side at Holyrood, of course (it’s she who persuades him to go through with the ceremony), and his sister, Caroline (Louise Stewart), also attends. Sometime afterwards, John visits his mother to show her his MBE medal and says he’s sorry he couldn’t invite her along as well. Shirley Henderson plays conscientious, woebegone Heather Davidson sympathetically enough, but her part is so underwritten that the treatment of John’s mother still feels unkind. That said, the rest of the Achenbach family is just about written out of the story too once Dottie gets the good news about her health. Given how much she’s in the film, it’s a relief that Maxine Peake is better than usual.
But I Swear is really about one character and depends on two performances. Scott Ellis Watson is excellent as the boy John, his unusual face and melancholy quality anticipating what’s to come for John’s older self. And Robert Aramayo is tremendous. In the first 1996 scene, John gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. Several jerking head movements later, he’s briefly still and the look of contained pain on Aramayo’s face is eloquent: you see both John’s apprehension of the day ahead and how physically exhausting Tourette’s must be. Although these moments aren’t the last where John is wearied by redundant, convulsive movement, they epitomise the wonder of Aramayo’s achievement over the course of the film. His technical mastery of John’s various tics, requiring precision and complete consistency, doesn’t in the least impede his creation of a rich, affecting personality.
There’s no denying either that John’s condition has its comical side, most enjoyably shown in Peter Mullan’s brilliantly bemused reactions during John’s job interview. Tommy Trotter’s tone turns gruff just once in that scene, when John’s uncontrolled right arm strikes Tommy’s beloved dog. Later in the story, John is living independently and gets his own dog. The short sequence that sees the pair preparing to cross a busy road is also very funny. ‘Go on then! Stay! Go on then! Stay!’, John keeps saying as traffic whizzes past. The animal knows the drill and ignores the first instruction, but you realise how tricky life must be for a dog with an owner like this. (This bit is reprised, along with John’s thumping Dottie in the supermarket, in a montage of video clips of the real John Davidson over the closing credits. I was baffled that such incidents had been recorded: it turns out they’re from a series of BBC TV documentaries about Davidson of which I knew nothing – John’s Not Mad (1989), The Boy Can’t Help It (2002) and Tourettes: I Swear I Can’t Help It (2009).)
Did it really happen that John got the job at the community centre on the very day that Dottie learned she didn’t have cancer and that, when she sent him out that same evening to buy a celebration Chinese takeaway, he was beaten up by two men in revenge for yelling abuse at a young woman and ended up in hospital with quite serious injuries? Was it the case that Tommy Trotter died suddenly, almost immediately after appearing as a character witness at John’s assault trial and delivering a passionate and persuasive defence of him? You watch these episodes in I Swear suspecting that Kirk Jones is reworking events to deliver extra emotional impact yet not minding at all. You so admire what Robert Aramayo is doing, and so much like the person he’s creating on screen, that audience manipulation seems a small price to pay: the actor’s talent and truth transcend it. At Tommy’s funeral, John is shown alone in a room behind the nave, grieving apart from the main congregation so as not to disturb the solemn service. This is very moving.
Robert Aramayo supplied the happy headlines for I Swear at the BAFTAs. His win in the Rising Star category was probably expected; his win in the Best Actor category certainly wasn’t but was thoroughly deserved. This portrait takes high rank among performances in what might be called the cinema of disability (though John Davidson would probably resent the phrase) – it’s up there with Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker (1962), Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot (1989), Mathieu Amalric in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything (2013). The later parts of the film focusing on John’s developing and successful advocacy work, are far from imaginative; right at the end, his visit to the University of Nottingham in 2023, to test a non-invasive median nerve stimulation (MNS) device designed for Tourette’s sufferers, runs the risk of being no more than a matter of bringing his story up to date. It’s a lot more than that, thanks to a short sequence in which John, wearing the MNS bracelet, manages to walk through the university library in incredulous, triumphant silence. I still don’t think my reasons for staying away from I Swear in the cinema last year were wrong but I’m so glad to have seen it now.
14 March 2026