Only You, 2019.
Directed by Harry Wootliff
Starring Laia Costa, Josh O’Connor, Lisa McGrillis, Natalie Arle-Toyne, Isabelle Barth, Tam Dean Burn, Stuart Martin
SYNOPSIS:
A chance encounter between two complete strangers, Jake (Josh O’Connor) and Elena (Laia Costa), results in them sharing a Taxi ride home on New Year’s Eve that sparks a movie-spanning relationship.
Love is a subject that has been tackled on the big-screen for time immemorial, yet Harry Wootliff’s directorial debut manages to create fresh scar tissue with its achingly realistic take on the minutiae of a modern relationship.
It might start like your average boy-meets-girl tale, with crossed wires cab-hailing acting as the meet-cute, but from thereon it’s a mirror-to-the-world mix of the embryonic euphoria of new love, followed by the appearance of insidious fracture lines that irreparably change this couple forever.
Only You is not an easy watch. It picks at the scabs of uncertainty that beset most couples, perfectly capturing the different shades of falling, and staying in love. Beautifully complex doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The value of self-worth is prevalent through Elena’s struggles in trying to conceive a child. Among many moments that’ll threaten to crack your own resolve as a viewer, there’s one in which she questions her value as a woman because of her failed pregnancies. It’s heart-breaking, but one of a number of aspects of Wootliff’s screenplay that challenges the expectations which are placed upon us by ourselves, society, and those whose lives we surround ourselves with.
Carrying the weight of this is an exceptional performance from Laia Costa (stunning in one-shot masterpiece Victoria), who delivers a transformative, painfully honest depiction of a woman dealing with the pressures of living a life in which tick boxes have been created by a set of pre-determined societal rules, and where she now feels like a failure. The psychological burden of this is etched all over Costa’s face, and is all-the-more painful because we’ve journeyed with her from the sweet, playful origins of her relationship with Jake.
He’s equally well drawn, with O’Connor backing up his charming performance in God’s Own Country with a tender, sympathetic, and utterly compelling turn. Their chemistry is palpable, with the intimate sex-scenes between the two brilliantly used as punctuation for the state of their relationship, and a final reel café confrontation that’s as finely acted as anything you’ll see this year. It’s the kind of on-screen pairing who say as much with silence as they do with reams of dialogue.
Wootliff frames the film impressively, her use of colours prominent as the love-story goes from the brightly lit scenes of young love, but dulls towards an autumn of hard-decision making for Elena and Jake. There’s also a wonderful piece of shot composition to look out for, in which the couple are separated by a wall partition during a particularly emotional scene. It feels as unforced and naturalistic as the entire movie.
A stripped-back contemporary fable, Only You is a grown-up film about grown-up people, one that’ll threaten to break your heart as often as it makes it skip-a-beat.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
