Film review

  • I Swear

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

     

     

  • A Pale View of Hills

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Toi yama-nami no hikari

    Kei Ishikawa (2025)

    Kazuo Ishiguro’s most popular novels were soon adapted for cinema.  Overrated as a book and as a film, The Remains of the Day was published in 1989 with the Merchant-Ivory movie released four years later.  Never Let Me Go, published in 2005, sold equally well as a novel; Mark Romanek’s underrated film version, which came out in 2010, fared less well, commercially and critically.  It has taken far longer for Ishiguro’s fine debut novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), to reach the screen.  When I re-read it recently, in anticipation of watching Kei Ishikawa’s film, the appeal and the difficulty of dramatising the book weren’t hard to see.  The nature of the source material virtually guarantees that attempts to make a film of it will be intriguing, but Ishikawa’s version of A Pale View of Hills is almost entirely unsatisfying.

    Until the late 1950s, Etsuko, the book’s first-person narrator, lived in Nagasaki with her first husband, Jiro; in 1952 she gave birth to a daughter, Keiko. By the time she emigrated to England, where her second daughter, Niki, was born, Etsuko was married to a British man.  In the early 1980s, she’s a widow living alone in rural southern England.  Keiko, who moved away from home to Manchester, recently committed suicide.  Niki, who lives in London, visits her mother for a few days.  During the visit, Etsuko recalls the summer when she was pregnant with her first child.  Her recollections are prompted in part by Niki’s eagerness to know more from her mother about the family history, with a view to writing about it (Niki has vague literary ambitions), but Etsuko’s Nagasaki memories focus chiefly on her short-lived friendship with Sachiko, a woman of about her own age.  Sachiko, a single parent with a ten-year-old daughter, Mariko, is in a relationship with Frank, an American serviceman.  She intends that she and Mariko will soon travel with Frank to the US and make their home there.  Mariko is vehemently opposed to the idea.

    Etsuko proves an unreliable narrator – the means whereby Ishiguro fashions an impressively ambiguous story.  There are striking resonances throughout A Pale View of Hills between the thirty-years-apart halves of the narrative.  In conversation, polite, determinedly obliging Etsuko is often on the receiving end from a brusquely opinionated interlocutor – Jiro as well as Sachiko in the 1950s, Niki in the 1980s.  If, in response, she qualifies or apologises for something she has said, Sachiko and Niki are liable to reproach Etsuko for her kneejerk acquiescence (as they see it).  Sachiko’s plans to start a new life in a new country, with a non-Japanese man, clearly chime with what will happen to Etsuko herself.  (It’s not explained how her marriage to chauvinist Jiro ended but one assumes it was in divorce.)  The chief link emerging from the two time periods is an uncooperative and introverted daughter.  The tensions between Sachiko and headstrong, friendless Mariko, expressed most strongly in the little girl’s opposition to Frank and the future that he threatens, are clear from an early stage.  The reader learns more gradually how Keiko, growing up in England, became increasingly unhappy and reclusive.

    By the novel’s end, the combination of these resonances has both clarified things and made them more uncertain.  It’s clear that Etsuko feels deep remorse for bringing Keiko to England – that she is thereby to blame for her first daughter’s troubled life and suicide:  at one point, Etsuko tells Niki that Niki’s father ‘really believed we could give [Keiko] a happy life over here … but … I knew all along she wouldn’t be happy’.  It becomes clear enough too that Etsuko’s Nagasaki memories are shadowed by her present state of mind, but it’s hard to say quite how much these memories are reshaped by what became of Keiko.  Etsuko remembers public alarm in Nagasaki about a series of unsolved child murders.  When wilful Mariko goes missing one night, Etsuko, rather than Sachiko, voices fears for the child’s safety.  This develops into a recurring pattern in the narrative.  Etsuko is repeatedly scolded by Sachiko for worrying unnecessarily; the experienced mother keeps telling the expecting mother she’ll need to change her ways once she has a child of her own.  Although one assumes the serial killings aren’t Etsuko’s invention, their main purpose in the story is to contrast Etsuko’s and Sachiko’s attitudes and create tension between them.  This is just one example of Ishiguro’s use of Etsuko’s narration to blur the boundary between what really happened in 1952 and how she views her past in hindsight.

    The book’s attractions as a potential film include Ishiguro’s expressive descriptions of locale, and the ease with which cinema can move between different times and places.  A filmmaker’s chief challenge comes in whether to retain an unreliable narrator and, if not, how instead to tell the story.  Kei Ishikawa, who wrote the screenplay for his film, deserves credit for not taking what might seem the easy option of Etsuko’s voiceover, but his choice of alternative is, in effect, muddled rather than mysterious.  In the novel, Niki, although temporarily present in her mother’s life in 1982, isn’t a major character.  She comes over as irritable and, despite professed interest in her mother’s past, somewhat disengaged; she returns to London well before the novel ends.  Ishikawa makes Niki a more central character – it’s she who comes to seem to be writing her mother’s story.  Even though she and Etsuko don’t have much conversation in the film about the past, Niki is several times shown tapping away on a typewriter.  She also features in several sequences from which Etsuko is absent.  Each of these sequences is, like the typewriter, a clumsy cliché.

    A phone call Niki makes to London, early in the film, presents her as a more established writer than in the novel.  She has been researching the anti-nuclear protests currently taking place at Greenham Common but the male voice on the other end of the phone line, either her publisher or her agent, suggests she use her family background to write about surviving a nuclear attack, though he stupidly confuses Nagasaki with Hiroshima.  It’s also clear from this phone conversation that he’s having an affair with Niki, and that he’s married; a bit later, Niki is in the bathroom doing a pregnancy test.  Her mother has put the house on the market; Etsuko is out when an estate agent calls and Niki shows him round.  The main point of this exchange is presumably to point up that, when he first visited the house, Etsuko wouldn’t let the estate agent see what was Keiko’s old bedroom – a point rather lost by the agent’s giving the impression, in what he says to Niki, that he’s not familiar with the house at all.  The action isn’t cliché-free even with Etsuko in the picture.  An exchange of cross words between her and Niki culminates in mother slapping daughter’s face – which seems entirely out of character for Etsuko.

    The legacies of Japanese defeat and of the atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki in 1945 come through strongly but never over-emphatically in Ishiguro’s story.  The post-war American occupation of Japan is represented by Frank, but he’s never seen by Etsuko and is talked about only by Sachiko and Mariko.  The latter often mentions to Etsuko a woman ‘across the river’; this mysterious figure, according to Sachiko, derives from an incident in Tokyo during the war, when she and Mariko saw a woman who had drowned her own baby then killed herself.  Jiro’s widowed father, Ogata, a retired schoolmaster, who visits Jiro and Etsuko, is much offended by a recent educational journal article by one of his former pupils, Shigeo Matsuda, deploring Ogata’s teaching and naming him as typical of the imperialist mindset that prevailed in 1930s Japan and led the country into a war that proved a national catastrophe.  Jiro, who fought in the war, is annoyed having his father as a house guest when he’s so busy at work.  As his son becomes more offhand and impatient, so Ogata’s obsession with Matsuda grows, and Etsuko eventually accompanies her father-in-law to Matsuda’s place of work.

    Although Ishikawa retains these elements, his treatment of them tends to be relatively crude.  Frank is briefly glimpsed in the film, to the accompaniment of local women reviling Sachiko for consorting with the enemy.  In the book, Ogata’s face-to-face meeting with Shigeo Matsuda leads the old man to climb down and reproach himself; in the film (in another scene sans Etsuko), Ogata is angrily confrontational.  It therefore makes less sense that he then immediately decides to end his visit and return, defeated, to his lonely life in Fukuoka.  Ishikawa distorts or abbreviates other strands or episodes to an extent that makes it hard to see why he retained them at all:  Sachiko’s part-time employment at a noodle joint; Jiro’s arriving home late with two drunken work colleagues; a day out for Etsuko, Sachiko and Mariko in Nagasaki.  The several stages of this excursion are a cumulatively important part of Etsuko’s apparently real memories in Ishiguro’s narrative.  Mariko’s memorable encounter with an obnoxious young boy during the day trip becomes almost perfunctory in the film.

    Some visual facets work well.  A rope motif in the Nagasaki scenes anticipates Keiko’s suicide by hanging.  Suzi Hirose (as the younger Etsuko) and Fumi Nikaido (Sachiko) don’t closely resemble each other, but Ishikawa and his cinematographer, Piotr Niemyjski, sometimes shoot their faces at angles that call to mind the face of the older Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida), conveying a sense of her being a combination of the two younger women.  Late on, Niki (Camilla Aiko) looks through a family album and pauses at a photo of Keiko in the 1950s.  It’s a photo of the same little girl (Mio Suzuki) we’ve been watching as Mariko – hardly subtle but effective as a clear message to the audience.  Ishikawa’s shallow faithfulness to the original novel is always in conflict, though, with Niki’s prominence in the story (Camilla Aiko’s unnuanced acting doesn’t help) – and never more so than in the film’s closing stages.

    After the photograph album revelation, Ishikawa briefly and unfortunately returns to Nagasaki in 1952, where Etsuko, now wearing a dress recognisable as one worn previously by Sachiko, addresses the girl who was Mariko as Keiko.  Is the idea that we’re now seeing the reality of the past, and that Sachiko and Mariko were figments of Etsuko’s remorseful imagination?   Surely not:  for a start, it would reduce Frank to a proxy for Etsuko’s future ‘foreign’ husband (and the whole US occupation dimension of the story to very little).  More likely, this moment is meant to show that Niki now understands, as she didn’t before, her mother’s feelings about bringing Keiko to England and painfully guilty conscience.  This may be implied too in Niki’s insisting to Etsuko, before returning to London, that what happened to her sister ‘wasn’t your fault’.  But those words ring hollow – especially since Niki, irritated that her mother wants her to start a family, also takes this opportunity to remind Etsuko that there’s more to life than having children, which prompts Etsuko to ask out loud what more.  These exchanges serve chiefly as a reminder that unsympathetic Niki is part of her mother’s present loneliness.  Kei Ishikawa’s decision to work Niki into the storytelling – and compete with Etsuko as the central consciousness of A Pale View of Hills – was the wrong decision.  He has turned Kazuo Ishiguro’s deft, elusive writing into heavy-handed cinema.

    13 March 2026

     

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