Sweet Sue review - delightfully hopeless Brits

You don’t have to be a casting director to know that Britain has a remarkable reservoir of unstarry middle-aged actors who might, just occasionally, get top spot in a movie – Joanna Scanlon in the wondrous After Love (2020) being an excellent example. Now we have Maggie O’Neill, veteran of TV shows like Shameless, Peak Practice and EastEnders, who takes the lead in this equally likeable effort by writer-director Leo Leigh.

It’s an ambling, facetious character-piece about hopeless classless numpties going round in circles, a film with surprisingly zero dud notes for a first-time moviemaker. Sweet Sue is a reminder that we have pretty good casting directors, too.

O’Neill’s Sue is a cheeky single Londoner of a certain vintage, careworn and lovelorn, who runs a party gift shop and whom we see near the start necking wine among some kids at an event she’s decked with balloons. She has a stock of suppressed laughter that comes from a life of let-downs, and the movie goes on the hunt for why anyone would consistently call her “sweet”. At her own brother’s funeral she picks up a morose northern biker called Ron (Tony Pitts), who’s like a monosyllabic comedy Viking. It’s as if her own sense of irony about him makes him appealing.

After a trip round the lives of several other losers and plonkers – including Gordon (Nick Holder), who steals dogs for a pastime and calls his dated coastal home, full of knick-knacks and tasselled lampshades, “a microcosm of a forgotten England” – she gets to know Ron’s exuberant adult son, Anthony (Harry Trevaldwyn), who lives off a rich roué businessman and pursues amateur disco dancing of a particularly cringe-worthy kind. (Trevaldwyn, who was in Judd Apatow’s The Bubble last year, is a significant discovery.)

Just as Sue, Ron and Anthony might be about to form a viable household none has ever known before, Sue’s love of the ludicrous threatens to upend them as Anthony preps for one of his kitschy dance nights. To her, the whole idea of settled domestic order seems yet another hoot, and escaping a retarded teenage mindset turns out to be the film’s challenge for the lot of them.

O’Neill is wonderfully weary and sparky by turns, and this conveyor belt of fatuous irritations and misreadings may be seen by few on the big screen, which is the way of things for debut filmmakers working at this small scale. The depressive, recessive Ron has the habit of donning his crash helmet indoors when human encounters get too much for him, which put me in mind of the young Tim Roth burying himself in his anorak hood in the 1983 movie Meantime. It’s a resonance that might not be wholly accidental, for Leo Leigh is the son of the Meantime director, Mike.

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