Ordinary Love uses clean lines and well observed tiny details to build up a deeply moving, nuanced portrait of a marriage under strain after a cancer diagnosis. Liam Neeson, playing a sweet but schlubby average guy who barely wants to go out for a walk stars opposite Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread) as his tiny but fierce spouse, together incarnating the kind of extraordinary regular people you see every day in hospital waiting rooms.
Playwright Owen McCafferty's first screenplay, informed by his own experience of supporting his wife through breast cancer, takes an unblinking look at how illness like this can be a forge that fuses or a fire that incinerates a marriage. In the sensitive hands of married directing team Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Lyburn, Ordinary Love becomes a scroll of minutely observed, filled with the nervous chatter of coping, that almost imperceptibly build up the pressure until the pain becomes almost too much to bear. A proper emotional wringer that's never for a second manipulative or sentimental, this should win plaudits, especially for the leads.
