On demand: "True Things"

Much like Joanna Hogg's celebrated The Souvenir, Harry Wootliff's 2021 drama True Things found a female British director working something (or some things) through within the tight confines of an Academy ratio frame with the assistance of BBC Films funding and Tom Burke in the role of unreliable male. The source this time isn't specifically personal reminiscence but the emotions stirred up, possibly reactivated by Deborah Kay Davies' novel True Things About Me. Ruth Wilson is the dreamy, distractible support worker for those on parole in the Ramsgate area; Burke's raffish, bleached-blond charmer the only one of her clients to treat her with anything other than contempt, which hardly marks him out as a great catch. Still, it's an obvious thrill when he offers her a lift home from work one Friday night, and thereafter the prospect of a quickie in a multistorey carpark: here is the kind of transgression that generally gets snuffed out by working in an office and adhering to the proper protocols. Here, too, the kind of risk that can be every bit as endangering as it is a turn-on: even amidst this first, broadly ecstatic encounter, we note that he throws her in such a way as to bump her head against the multistorey's concrete wall. The first of many truths Wootliff's film throws up: in love, as in other fields, caution must be exercised.

It is, then, a cautionary tale, but - again not unlike The Souvenir - True Things never feels as overbearing as that term would imply, so alert is Wootliff to the minutiae of her characters' lives. The focus is as narrow as the frame, but those occupying the frame seem real, palpable, tangible. Wilson in particular, dialling down her usual emotional intelligence to give us a woman so starved for attention (and touch) that she's left herself vulnerable to any passing bounder, and started setting her most delicate eggs in this most rough-hewn of baskets. Even if you don't personally know anyone like this, you will almost certainly have read about them: throwing herself into this uncertain tryst, she risks at best terrible disappointment and heartbreak, at worst - you fear - the loss of several thousand pounds of savings, perhaps even her own life. Burke's brusque chancer appears so upfront we, too, could be persuaded he has nothing in the world to hide, but there are red flags apparent if you know how to interpret them: his shrugging disclosure of parental neglect, the big yawn he gives in response to her wish that things could stay this way forever, his tendency to disappear for long stretches, occasionally with her car. (His dismissive-defensive query "what are you trying to do, climb inside me?" would in itself suggest some resistance to the idea of becoming a vessel for her longing and insecurities.)

The actors complicate this bad-romance scenario, and our feelings. He's plainly a man after a shag; he's neither the first nor the last of those, which may well be why Wootliff increasingly films Burke as almost an abstract or fairytale figure, more spectre drifting in and out of this woman's grasp than fully fathomable, flesh-and-blood man. (Hard - not to mention silly - to pin all your romantic hopes on someone when they're basically thin air, a breeze prone to turning in a completely different direction.) She's someone you would have thought old enough to know better, but still she persists in digging a terribly deep hole; for some people, but relatively few movie characters, love can be an unhealthy addiction, a rabbit to be chased even if it scatters your bearings and the self-sufficiency required for self-worth. Wootliff's sympathies aren't entirely where you might expect them to be, which is noteworthy: she appears far more closely aligned with Hayley Squires as Wilson's more practical and responsible married colleague, or her harried heroine's parents, quietly content with a night sat in front of the telly. (But then all of these have somebody.) It makes for a prickly miniature, finally closer to Maren Ade's The Forest for the Trees and Catherine Breillat's Abuse of Weakness than it is to the Souvenirs: a film bound to spark frustration in viewers hoping for an easier ride and provoke fractious post-viewing conversation, even as it lives up to the promise of honesty made by its title. Nobody on screen comes out of True Things especially well, but I suspect there will have been many more relationships like this - brief encounters, false projections, failed experiments - than there have been happily ever afters. Here is a rare Brit film that proceeds from a hard-won, slightly stinging wisdom: that we have all, at some time or another, been fools for love.

True Things is currently streaming on the iPlayer, and available to rent via Prime Video, the BFI Player and YouTube; a DVD is also available through Picturehouse Entertainment.