Jane is small – too small for her clothes – and lives in a flat on a council estate. She takes tablets for paranoid schizophrenia, provoked by her distress and humiliation when her groom, Johnny, failed to show at their wedding. She doesn’t work, doesn’t have a social life at all, but does see her family. A sister, with her husband and 10-year-old son, lives nearby, in an anonymous modern semi. And in walking distance is her childhood home, with a well-tended front garden and hardline aspirational mum, dad, tough younger sister and near-mute teenage niece.
This may sound grim and Roberts’ second feature is unflinching, but it’s also funny, and though often threatens disaster, somehow pulls through. Sally Hawkins, almost always on screen, magnificently gets Jane – her fogginess, naivety and confusion, and her winning acuteness and generosity.
