Ordinary Love review: Manville and Neeson's affecting cancer drama is ordinary to a fault

Dirs: Lisa Barros D'Sa, Glenn Leyburn. Cast: Lesley Manville, Liam Neeson, David Wilmot, Amit Shah. 12A cert, 92 mins

Two sedate middle-class lives are rocked in Ordinary Love by a breast cancer diagnosis – a sudden lump, found in the shower, which changes everything. Thanks to Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson, the unremarkable nature of this story becomes its strength, but the modest, well-acted virtues of the piece could have resonated profoundly with a little more detail.

The leads play Joan and Tom, a long-married couple living in Northern Ireland, who lost their only daughter years ago – a fact we don’t find out for some time, and without explanation, since they barely mention this faded source of grief. Their house is hushed and tidy, their routines – a daily constitutional along the waterfront, bickering trips to the supermarket – deeply enshrined.

A chasm of unspoken fear opens up between them when Joan’s first scan reveals a cyst, and the second one a possible cancer. Up to a point, they go through the traumas of treatment hand-in-hand, but the film is astute on all the ways a medical crisis can make the two halves of a couple feel scared and alone.

Manville has proved many times, especially for Mike Leigh, how she can settle into the skins of conventional women, softly intuiting their pain. Joan reaches out here – especially to fellow chemo patients in her ward – to answer all the questions nagging away. We watch her gathering her resources to pull through, when a double mastectomy and ensuing hair loss could so easily trigger despair.

Neeson, meanwhile, is like a slab of granite deeply etched by worry, and protective to a fault – Tom tetchily lets rip at doctors, and can’t help his wife resign herself to what science is telling them to do. Much of their best acting here is done sitting apart, taking a breath away from each other, and letting all the possible outcomes sink in.

The film, a solid notch but not a breakthrough for long-term collaborators Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn, swerves emotional manipulation while scoring with a quiet bravery to match its subject. There’s a late sex scene pulled off with absolute candour, squeamishness-free.

Then again, there are times when the undemonstrative style merely seems to be staying out of the way – it lacks an exploratory eye, or the intense illumination that inspired cinema might shed on this theme.

It’s rather the point that these characters have earned a film because – and only because – one of them has breast cancer. But does that leave it with much to say? Gently affecting though their ordeal is, the film is so withholding, so doggedly minimalist, you’d be forgiven for wanting to feel a bit more.

Everything Joan and Tom go through is handled believably, but with blinkers on. Their surrounding lives feel grey and pencilled in, as if by all-round agreement to deny them any colour.

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