True Things

True Things

The Bureau

VERDICT: Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke star in this visually ravishing depiction of obsessive love and destructive desire.

Ruth Wilson plays a thrill-starved young woman looking for love in all the wrong places in True Things, a visually ravishing exploration of female desire and fragile self-esteem. Adapted from the 2010 novel True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies, director Harry Wootliff’s second feature is a darker and richer prospect than her 2019 debut Only You. The first fruits of Wilson’s newly launched production company Lady Lazarus, this emotionally raw British drama world premieres in Venice this week before heading to Toronto, with a competition slot lined up at London Film Festival in October.

Wilson stars as Kate, a nervy, lonely, 30-ish hot mess who derives zero satisfaction from her mundane job at a drab welfare benefits office in a shabby satellite town on the Thames estuary, east of London. Bored with her narrow horizons, conventional co-workers and dreary routine, she is a sitting target for the dangerous charisma of her latest client (Burke), a magnetically charming ex-con whose high-voltage flirting quickly escalates into reckless sex in public spaces. Christening her nameless new lover “Blond” after his punky bleached hair, Kate runs headlong into an illicit, full-blooded affair with him. He’s toxic, she’s slipping under.

This lustful fascination initially flows both ways. But Blond soon proves moody, distant and fearful of intimacy, his adoring compliments cooling into casual cruelty. He introduces Kate to an enticing new life of drugs, parties and wild rule-breaking, but he also routinely abuses her generosity and disappears for long periods. As family and friends pressure her towards taking the conventional path to marriage and motherhood, Kate is forced to reassess how far her personal desires have been shaped by social expectations. When Blond turns the romantic charm back on during a Spanish holiday, she is torn between delicious fantasy and hard-nosed realism.

Filmed just as the Coronavirus pandemic broke, which caused a shutdown early in production, True Things was originally set to co-star Jude Law. Burke stepped in as replacement, although Law retains a producer credit. Burke’s manipulative anti-hero is perhaps a little too similar to his gaslighting upper-class junkie in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019), although Blond is much more of a lowlife bruiser, a modern-day Stanley Kowalski with a petty criminal edge. Had Law played the role, with his icy hauteur and vulpine beauty, the screen chemistry could have been very different. A more unconventional sex symbol, Burke arguably makes Blond more sympathetic, hinting at wounded vulnerability and poetic sensitivity beneath the cocky surface swagger.

But True Things is essentially Wilson’s baby and it is her multi-layered, full-spectrum portrayal of all-consuming obsession that sizzles most here. The production is also noteworthy as a richly layered portrait of female desire created by an all-women core team of talents. Alongside Wilson, Wootliff and co-writer Molly Davis, major credit is due to the strong visual storytelling input from hotshot New York-based cinematographer Ashley Connor (Madeline’s Madeline, The Miseducation of Cameron Post), whose kinetic, probing, emotionally charged camerawork tracks Kate’s feverish highs and lows with forensic intimacy.

Connor’s sultry visuals make great use of lens flare, sunshine glare and fuzzy, semi-abstract imagery. Her sweaty, blurry close-ups of hair, eyes, moist lips and naked flesh create an erotically charged effect without ever succumbing to pornographic voyeurism. When Kate and Blond are in a state of carnal intoxication, entire scenes seem to have a post-coital glow, their saturated hues popping off the screen like ripe fruit. Later, when the relationship begins to sour, camera movements become jagged and unbalanced, colours muted and grubby. Connie Farr’s score follows a similar emotional arc, sparkly and dreamy at first, jabbing and discordant later.

True Things is a sumptuous sensory feast, but it occasionally jars as drama. While Wilson and Burke are both riveting on screen, they sometimes risk slipping into mannered caricatures of their marginalised lower-class protagonists. Background characters, especially Kate’s disapproving parents (Elizabeth Rider, Frank McCusker) and a pompous internet date (Tom Weston-Jones) who she meets in a failed bid to shake off her obsession with Blond, feel like thinly drawn villains. Kate’s obstinate lack of curiosity about Blond’s murky backstory also becomes increasingly implausible as their relationship deepens. A couple of hallucinatory nightmare sequences – slavering dogs, thunderstorms – lean a little too heavily on gothic horror cliché.

But overall, True Things is a welcome subversion of traditional male-driven plots about sexually irresponsible damsels in distress who are typically punished for breaking social norms. The “gaze” here is emphatically female, with Wilson’s heroine allowed 50 shades of nuance while Burke’s obscure object of desire is never fully fleshed out, nor even named. However rash her behaviour, Kate retains agency, self-awareness and sexual autonomy. She is never just a victim.

Refreshingly, Blond is not just a crude emblem of toxic masculinity either, despite his emotionally stunted narcissism. In the source novel, Kate’s lover is depicted as an Adonis-like beauty with a violently abusive temper, plus another woman and children in his life. His portrayal in True Things is more opaque but also more empathetic, showing his endearing sweetness as well as his callous immaturity. He is clearly terrible boyfriend material, but Kate’s obsession with him has a raw authenticity. We all know self-destructive souls like her, trying to save themselves by saving others.

Director: Harry Wootliff
Screenplay: Harry Wootliff, Molly Davis, from the novel True Things About Me by Deborah Key Davies
Cast: Ruth Wilson, Tom Burke, Hayley Squires, Elizabeth Rider, Frank McCusker
Producers: Tristan Goligher, Ruth Wilson, Ben Jackson, Jude Law
Cinematography: Ashley Connor
Editing: Tim Fulford
Production designer: Andy Drummond
Costume designer: Matthew Price
Music: Connie Farr
Sound: Joakim Sundström
Production companies: The Bureau (UK), Lady Lazarus (UK), Riff Raff (UK)
World sales: The Bureau Sales, Paris
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti)
In English
102 minutes