True Things: Ruth Wilson as A Woman Undone, Half-Willingly
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
The psychological drama True Things starring Ruth Wilson (The Affair, Luther) is one of those disturbing character studies that you tend to watch through half-closed fingers, rooting for someone while watching them make self-sabotaging choices. Although it’s not a life-affirming or audience-flattering parable, the drama feels refreshingly raw and adult.
Wilson plays Kate, a restless woman in her thirties, who works as a clerk in an employment benefits office in a seaside English town. She’s bored, lonely, and so careless about her work she’s at risk of getting sacked. When the opportunity arises, she plunges into the oblivion of a sexual relationship that’s an escape into sensation and, perhaps, a confirmation of her own low self-esteem.
One day, she meets a client (Tom Burke), a man with a trashy blond dye job and an insolent swagger, who sizes her up as he sits across from her in her cubicle. He’s recently done four months in jail for some reason. From the outset, he pushes aggressively into her space. Half-jokingly, he invites her out to lunch; a few hours later, they’ve having sex in a parking garage next to his car.
True Things is director Harry Wootliff’s adaption of Welsh writer Deborah Kay Davies’ novel True Things About Me. Wootliff’s debut feature was 2018’s Only You, a relationship drama about a couple trying to conceive a child through invitro fertilization.
The script, by Wootliff and Molly Davies, makes it clear that Kate is, at least initially, very much led by her own sense of sexual prerogative. While the man’s paperwork lists his name as “Samuel,” Kate identifies him on her phone simply as “Blond.”
She objectifies him, a good-looking uninhibited bad boy who makes her feel desired. Like someone with an all-consuming addiction, though, she quickly loses her sense of self-protection. She starts blatantly skipping work, getting drunk and high. Her boundaries become increasingly confused.
On a blind date with a rather more proper man, she repels him when she attempts to drunkenly seduce him in his car. Her only friend, Alison (Hayley Squires) is appalled at Kate’s behaviour, correctly reading Blond as a lowlife bad influence.
Blond, after his initial keenness, becomes more desirable by becoming more elusive, occasionally delivering shots of negative reinforcement that glue her to him. He has a habit of disappearing for days on end. At one point, he borrows her car for a “business” trip and doesn’t return for a week.
There’s a certain sense of déjà vu about the forceful sensuality of the performances in True Things. In the Showcase drama The Affair, Wilson (the producer here) played another unhappy woman seeking to comfort herself in a transgressive relationship (though famously Wilson quit the series saying she found the sex scenes gratuitous and unsafe).
Even more obviously, Burke has played a working-class variation on the toxic lover and heroin user in Joanna Hogg’s quietly devastating autobiographical film, The Souvenir.
Though True Things is far from a comedy, it has light moments, in particular, Blond’s macho bravado, which is almost comic, a low-rent coxcomb. But it’s also a drama that reflects the repetitious grind of a bad relationship. After a series of repeated episodes where Blond lets Kate down, dominates and humiliates her, he makes a kind of commitment to win her back, inviting her to Malaga, Spain for his sister’s wedding.
In the different context, the romantic aura evaporates. There’s a scene of him lying asleep, naked, two-toned with a sun-burnt back and white bum. Still, the ending feels rushed and anti-climactic. Possibly, that’s part of the point. Last night’s burning flame is, in the hungover morning, just another table full of empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays.
True Things. Directed by Harry Wootliff. Written by Harry Wootliff and Molly Davies, based on the novel, True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies. Starring Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke. Available on VOD, AppleTV+, Google Play and the Cineplex Store beginning September 20.