Kieran Evans’s romance is sensitively acted and disappointingly thin on character. Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Julian Morris make the attraction persuasive, but the accumulating misery exhausts our concern for the couple.
Kieran Evans approaches Kelly + Victor as a romance whose attraction does not become simple to dismiss when it starts to hurt. Adapted by the director from Niall Griffiths’s novel, it gives the lovers enough tenderness for us to understand why they might want each other. The film is uneven, with performances that hold our attention long after the writing has begun to lose it. Its problem is how little we learn about these people beyond their capacity to suffer.
Antonia Campbell-Hughes is the main reason to stay with it. She gives Kelly a vulnerability that keeps us interested even when the screenplay provides little to distinguish her from any other troubled lover. Julian Morris makes Victor’s attraction credible, and the two actors are persuasive in their intimacy. Their work needs more ordinary detail around it, so that these people can acquire interests and habits beyond the difficult relationship occupying the screen.
The intimate scenes are where the film comes closest to working. We were unsettled by the way tenderness persists alongside physical pain: the affection prevents us from dismissing what happens as mere provocation. Kieran Evans keeps his attention on the couple, giving the actors room to convey the attraction within those uncomfortable encounters. For a while, the tenderness gives us a reason to remain with a romance that is otherwise difficult company.
Piers McGrail’s framing gives Liverpool a welcome presence beyond its function as the place where these people suffer. There is pleasure in looking at the city, which helps prevent the film’s gloom from becoming visually monotonous. The cinematography also gives us something to attend to when the dialogue grows flat, though this is a limited defence of a drama. The supporting characters, especially, could have used some of that attention.
Tony Kearns’s editing is less successful at giving the material a steady rhythm. The movement between the central relationship and the subsidiary stories feels choppy, so scenes that ought to deepen our interest can interrupt it instead. The musical selections are better judged, helping the changes of mood without making the tenderness feel forced. There is care in the music and the images, even when the story leaves us unconvinced.
The screenplay’s contrivances are more damaging than its awkward dialogue. Kieran Evans keeps adding complications to a relationship that already has enough difficulty within it, and the additional stories make the couple’s suffering feel increasingly arranged. A film about painful desire has to make us believe in decisions we might find hard to explain or share. Here, the writing too often expects the actors’ commitment to carry us past questions about why anyone would behave this way.
Romantic dramas can leave motives partly obscure; few of us could give a tidy account of every attachment. But when pain takes up this much of a film, small signs of a life outside the relationship matter. A little humour or an ordinary shared interest would give the tenderness more weight and make the distress less repetitive. Leave this one for an evening when fine acting is enough.
