FILM
manner and a smile suggesting
that he knows just how this is
going to turn out.
So do we. And probably so
does Kate. She is played, after
all, by Ruth Wilson, who dove
into erotic enthrallment in
Showtime’s The Affair and
could probably do with time
off from rolling with strange
men on windswept beaches.
“I don’t know anything
about you,” she says to Samuel,
whose name she gleans from
his records, but saves him in
her phone under “Blond” and
is soon tagging along for a spot
of skinny-dipping in the woods.We barely need to see the rusty
wreck in the aqua-green water
to know: she’s going under.
Adapted from Deborah Kay
Davies’s novel True Things
About Me, the film is very good
on the tyrannical power of
mystery and the way men turn
vagueness to their sexual
advantage. Samuel withholds,
and when Kate’s attempts to
give chase turn desperate, he
turns that desperation back on
her — “Why are you trying to
corner me?” — and uses it as
further reason for withholding,
a cycle of behaviour that^
many may find awfully familiar.“You’re lovely, aren’t cha?” says
a mysterious, insinuatingly
sexy young man with a
peroxide mop of hair (Tom
Burke) as he goes in for his first
kiss with Kate (Ruth Wilson)
in Harry Wootliff ’s True
Things. They’re standing in
a multistorey car park, of all
places, that only adds to the
illicit thrill as they have sex
against the concrete wall —
that old standby of the erotic
thriller, from Fatal Attraction to
Damage — although this time
Wilson cradles the back of her
head afterwards: “Ow, that
hurt.” As the title suggests,
Wootliff ’s film sets up shop in
the gap between the
intoxicating allure of sexual
fantasy and the cold, hard
daylight of reality. It’s about
grazed knees and carpet burn,
all the stuff Lady Chatterley
never told us about.
“It’s like you’re on another
bloody planet,” Kate’s boss
tells her at the benefits office
where she whiles away much
of her time swiping through
Tinder and fantasising about
sandy sex on aqua-oceaned
beaches. Reality bites just that
little bit harder when you live
in Ramsgate. Then one day a
young man who has just served
a stretch in prison sits down
opposite her to make a benefits
claim. “Do you want to get
out?” he asks. “Sit on a bench?”
Numerous red flags go up
immediately. That four-month
prison stretch, for one thing;
then the rule against dating
clients; and finally the fact that
he is played by Burke, fresh
from Joanna Hogg’s The
Souvenir, where he played
another dark charmer with
an unravelling gaze, cocky
So familiar, in fact, that you
may feel a little like fast-
forwarding the film to get the
inevitable over with. Wootliff ’s
film bets big on up-close
physical impressionism —
we get lots of ambient noise,
shallow focus, background
blur, handheld cameras and
heavy breathing — but is a little
miserly with narrative detail, so
focused on the mystery of him
that it rather forgets to solve the
mystery of her. As Kate starts
skipping work, drafting textsLady Chatterley
with carpet burns
Ruth Wilson and
Tom Burke are
caught between
erotic fantasy and
cold reality
True Things
Harry Wootliff, 15, 102min
HHH
The Bubble
Judd Apatow, 15, 126min
HHH
TOM
SHONE
she never sends and spiralling,
through a montage of
windscreen blur and pizzicato
violins, into dreams about
suicide, you can feel Wootliff ’s
film-making technique
substituting for basic
information: who is this
mysteriously glamorous
benefits officer? What is in
Kate’s background to propel
her into this kind of obsession?
Kate loses herself but we don’t
know who she is to begin with
apart from the fact that she is
the girl from The Affair led on
a merry dance by the guy from
The Souvenir — as if Destiny
were simply an unimaginative
casting agent.
For a solid 40 minutes
Judd Apatow’s comedy The
Bubble, about a beleaguered
Hollywood production during
the height of the pandemic,
cuts just a little sharper and
funnier than you think.
Inspired by the shooting of
Jurassic World Dominion, the
script, with fellow screenwriter
Pam Brady, was knocked out
before the virus releases its
hold on us. “Let’s make the
world forget all its problems,”
the director Darren Eigan
(Fred Armisen) says to the cast
of dino-franchise Cliff Beasts 6
— which includes David
Duchovny as the franchise’s
leathery star, Leslie Mann as his
co-star and recently divorced
wife, and Pedro Pascal as a
drug-snorting hotshot — as^
they negotiate a set of safety
procedures that leave the
horny, attention-starved actors
hungry for affirmation.
This could easily have been
the usual set of weak jabs at
Hollywood egos, but the film
has a cut-to-the-quick
sharpness, thanks to Apatow’s
keen eye for the human
pain underlying the glitzy
entitlement, from the star
trying to outrun his mortality
on the rowing machine (“Time
cannot catch me!”), to the
stuntman’s daughter, at a loose
end during a meet-and-greet
(“I’m lonely and I’m in hell and
I would like to form an alliance
with you.”) I particularly loved
Duchovny and Mann’s doubts
over their 16-year-old son,
adopted just before the
divorce, quickly going to seed
playing video games (“Do
you think we picked the right
kid?). By Apatow’s illustrious
standards it’s a quickie, and
probably deserved to be a good
20 minutes shorter, but it still
bears his distinctive mixture of
cruelty and commiseration. cMORE NEW
RELEASESThe Bad Guys
In cinemas
U, 100min HHHHAn LA-based crime movie
for kids, this DreamWorks
animation involves a gang of
roguish crooks who happen
to be talking animals: a wolf,
a snake, a tarantula, a piranha
and a shark (the last two
having a remarkable ability toexist on dry land). Persuaded
to try going straight, they race
through a quippy, twist-filled
adventure. Children will enjoy
its all-round whizziness;
adults its nice parallels with
grown-up pulp fiction.Sonic the Hedgehog 2
In cinemas
PG, 122min HHThe sequel to the Sega
mascot’s 2020 film takes the
stuff of 12A superhero movies
and jarringly modifies it for aHHHHH KO HHHH A-OK
HHH OK HH So-so H No-noyounger audience. As the
hero and his allies battle Jim
Carrey’s Dr Robotnik, blows
land with crashing force and
landscapes are laid waste,
yet Sonic is always a yappy
little tyke with little appeal to
anyone older than ten. Jeff
Fowler’s film will keep many
children entertained, but
it’s charmless.Edward PorterUp against it Tom Burke and
Ruth WIlson in True Things14 3 April 2022