Harry Wootliff (2021)

Harry Wootliff’s second feature is the story of a woman’s obsessive attachment to a clearly unreliable man – or, rather, a man who reliably mistreats her.  Kate (Ruth Wilson), in her thirties and single, lives in Ramsgate and works in a benefits claims centre.  She prefers her phone screen, scrolling through images of sunny holiday destinations, to her office PC.  Her manager (Michael Moreland) warns Kate about poor time-keeping and absenteeism.  (Is it really the case that you need a medical certificate for a one-day migraine?)  As he talks, her attention wanders to two flies crawling up the wall.  She perks up a bit when a new claimant, probably about the same age as her, arrives at her desk – a peroxide blonde-haired man (Tom Burke), who has just been released from prison.  After running through claim registration formalities, she asks if he has any further questions.  ‘What are you doing for lunch?’ he replies.  By the end of the working day, they’re having a stand-up quickie in a multi-storey car park.  Blond (as he’s known throughout the film) aggressively calls the shots during this encounter but it’s Kate on whom it makes a lasting impression.  While they’re having sex, her head smacks into the wall behind her (‘You all right there, darlin’?’).  It’s not long into True Things before you’re wondering if that collision with concrete has resulted in brain damage.  Why does Kate pursue a hopeless relationship with this man?

It says a lot for the direction and for Ruth Wilson’s performance that, not too much further into the narrative, you accept Kate’s unhappy devotion to Blond – even though he repeatedly goes incommunicado and, when he re-emerges, is mostly antagonistic and insulting about Kate’s attitudes, dress sense, and more.   You accept this not simply because you know there’s no film without it.   The screenplay, by Wootliff and Molly Davies (adapted from Deborah Kay Davies’s 2010 novel True Things About Me), doesn’t give the isolated protagonist much context – she seems to be an only child with just one friend, Alison (Hayley Squires), who’s also a work colleague – but it’s enough to show that, as well as being turned on by Blond and enjoying sex with him, he represents a kind of grim corrective to a life that’s stifling Kate.  In the latter part of the story, Wilson occasionally suggests the character’s own incomprehension of why she wants more of Blond and her driven curiosity to find out what will happen next, though it’s bound to be unpleasant.  The viewer shares this combination of feelings.  Ashley Connor’s cinematography also helps realise the obsession: the camera is often so close up on Ruth Wilson that it’s virtually sharing Kate’s point of view.

Like Wootliff’s first film, Only You (2018), True Things is limited but absorbing, and Kate’s monomania serves to validate the one-track story.  The main characters aren’t likeable as they were in Only You but Wootliff delivers some deft mood shifts.  On one of Kate’s rare enjoyable outings with Blond, when they go swimming and sunbathing together, he makes fun of the ‘posh’ way she talks – ‘I bet you call your parents mummy and daddy’.  Kate, amused, replies that her parents’ names are Susan and Trevor, and asks what Blond calls his.  The answer to that is ‘bitch and cunt’:  he says he never knew his father and that his mother put him in care when he was a young child.  When we first meet Kate’s (un-posh) mother and father (Elizabeth Rider and Frank McCusker) the details of lower-middle-class conventionality feel a bit overdone – until Wootliff starts to ring the changes.  Susan’s tone, as she announces that Kate’s married cousin has just had another baby, is chiding and wistful; both parents want to know more about their daughter’s new (unnamed) young man.  Kate explains that he’s been having a tough time but is now getting back on his feet even though ‘he has no legs’.  Her mother is suitably appalled; her father laughs when Kate reveals she’s joking.  He tells Kate she must take some of his home-grown tomatoes, which she insists she doesn’t want.  Wootliff then cuts to her driving back from her parents’ home with tears in her eyes and tomatoes on the passenger seat.

There are moments where Kate’s awareness of the potential effects of what she’s doing make her think twice.  Although phone texts are by now a standard part of film vocabulary, Wootliff makes clever use of them.   Kate composes an enthusiastic message to Blond that ends in four exclamation marks; on reflection, she removes three of them.  On the point of sending him a less jolly text, complaining about what he’s done, she pauses then deletes it.  Kate seems to feel a duty to do what’s expected of her.  After a showdown with her mother, she makes amends by accompanying Susan, numbly and glumly, on a tour round a show house.  At other times when she tries to do the conventional thing, Kate does it wrong.  During one of Blond’s absences, she goes on a blind date, arranged by Alison, with Rob (Tom Weston-Jones) – he’s good-looking, pleasantly sociable, and he bores Kate silly.  She drinks too much in the bar where they meet; when Rob gives her a lift home, she starts removing her dress and asking him for sex.  He’s appalled (‘This is a work car!’) and hurriedly drops her off near her flat.  Waiting outside to reclaim Kate is Blond, who takes her to a party, during which he vanishes again.

As in The Souvenir (2019), Tom Burke plays a capricious, controlling figure who takes over the heroine’s life, this time with a dodgy instead of an RP accent.  Burke gives another strong performance but having less to say makes it harder for him to build a character – as Wootliff surely intends:  she presents Blond primarily in terms of what he is to Kate.  We don’t know whether the little he reveals about his past is true, and Kate is rarely inclined to find out more.  Blond claims to have spent his formative years in a series of homes; he also claims to have a sister and an invitation, including a plus one, to her wedding in Spain.  Kate never asks about the sibling relationship when they were growing up.  At one point, in desperation, she turns up outside the address Blond gave at the benefits centre.  She doesn’t see much or hang around for long, though, and there’s no follow-up to this visit.

Kate’s phone-screen sun-seeking eventually becomes an acrid then a liberating reality.  She goes to Spain as Blond’s wedding companion but travels from England alone.  He’s not there to meet her at the airport; by the time he turns up, she’s angry enough to be short with him.  As they get ready to go to a party that evening, he vetoes the shoes she was planning to wear.  At the party, she’s left on her own as Blond chats up other women and joins in swimming-pool horseplay.  Kate wanders out into the town, then into a club.  (The flashing lights forced me to look away so I’m guessing that, like Kate’s preceding stroll in the town, her visit to the club simply delivers an enlightening taste of independence.)  She returns to the hotel room, where Blond is asleep in bed, and writes him a message.  This time there are no second thoughts or edits.  The camera shows us the message though it doesn’t need to.  We know Kate will use exactly the same words Blond scribbled down on one of the occasions he left her in the lurch:  ‘Had to run.  See you’.  The next morning Kate is driving unaccompanied through a sunny landscape.  For the first time in True Things – in its closing shot – she looks relaxed.

Most of us will be relieved that Kate finally gets Blond out of her system – but just like that?  The Damascene conversion undermines the film’s premise.  Even so, Harry Wootliff has made another consistently absorbing drama.  The sex scenes are exemplary:  they’re discreetly done but strongly convey how much the sex means to Kate (and how little to Blond).  Through Ashley Connor’s lens, Ramsgate, in the town and on the seafront, is emotionally expressive to a surprising degree.  Ruth Wilson gets good support from the reliable Hayley Squires as Alison, well-intentioned but always keen to be in charge of Kate, and Tom Weston-Jones, who helps make the blind date episode a grimly amusing highlight of True Things.  The music, effectively used, is by Alex Baranowski and, during the closing credits, Claude Debussy.

2 April 2022