Ruth Wilson is mesmerising as an unhappy benefits officer who develops an unhealthy attraction to a charismatic stranger in Harry Wootliff’s assured psychological drama
After her wonderfully engrossing feature debut, Only You, writer-director Harry Wootliff turns to a rather more toxic relationship, balancing elements of romantic melodrama and psychological thriller in a film powered by modern gothic passions. Loosely adapted from Deborah Kay Davies’s book True Things About Me, it’s a disturbingly seductive (and often unexpectedly funny) portrayal of manipulation and deceit that gets right under the skin of its protagonist, brilliantly played by Ruth Wilson, who walks a tightrope between enchantment and endangerment. With great physical poise and precision, Wilson (who optioned and developed the source book) engages the audience on a visceral level, her deceptively low-key performance taking us deep inside her character’s dreams, desires and insecurities.
Wilson plays Kate, a somewhat tremulous thirtysomething daydreamer whose personal life has stalled and who is just about holding down a humdrum job at a benefits office in Ramsgate. When a charismatic claimant (Tom Burke) cockily asks what she’s doing for lunch, Kate flirtatiously throws caution to the wind and soon finds herself in an unexpectedly erotic car-park encounter that is as thrilling as it is risky. Like Kate, we know little or nothing about her mesmerising new lover, whom she names Blond, but whose particulars (his history, his status, even his whereabouts) remain enigmatically vague. What we do know is that Kate becomes instantly addicted to his pointedly unpredictable attentions, craving his calls and his company, infatuated with his presence – all the more so in his frustratingly frequent absence.
