Kirk Jones

In I Swear (2025) a stranger hears John Davidson shout something he cannot help, and flinches. Give the film a scene or two and the stranger has softened. That is the Kirk Jones shape, and it has been since his first feature: people wary of one another at the start and fond of one another by the end, with the hard part handled quickly or off screen. He is good at it. After nearly thirty years it is fair to ask whether he is interested in anything else.

He came out of Newport Film School into commercials and directed more than a hundred of them before Waking Ned (1998), which he wrote and directed. That village comedy made his name for character comedy and pace, and it led to the studio family film Nanny McPhee (2005). Then came the American comedies: Everybody's Fine (2009), which he adapted himself from an Italian original, What to Expect When You're Expecting (2012) and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (2016). Critics found them predictable and sentimental, and nobody had said that about the debut. With I Swear he went back to writing his own script from a real life, and produced it too. The film is his in a way the studio work was not.

What works is the casting and the care. Jones often writes from real people and his own observation, and he works his actors hard on tone; Robert Aramayo's tics in I Swear were prepared at length, and the performance is the reason to see the film. Maxine Peake and Peter Mullan are used as well as you would hope. Henry Braham has photographed three of his films, and Jones is plainly a director people come back to. He can also be honest when he chooses. We found Shirley Henderson's kitchen scenes in I Swear, a mother who cannot bring herself to touch her son, harder to sit through than anything John shouts in public, and the film's refusal to make a monster of her is its best decision.

What does not work is the softness everywhere else. Jones does not do friction. Every awkward stranger relents on schedule, every institution comes round, and a life that must have held a great deal of unresolved unpleasantness is resolved, pleasantly, in 121 minutes. We scored I Swear 70 and most critics have been kinder, which we understand; it is hard to hold the manner against a film this decent about its subject. But the manner has not changed since 1998.

He has said that the best way to educate is to entertain at the same time, and every film he has made believes it. Next he is attached to a live-action Mr Benn. We expect it to be warm, tidy and well cast, and to send us out feeling better about people. We would like, one day, to come out surprised.