Ordinary Love

Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville star in this intimate and sensitively-handled drama about a couple dealing with breast cancer.

As the Christmas decorations go up, we quickly get a sense of Joan and Tom’s bantering relationship; witty and teasing, they’re a couple who can finish each other’s sentences. When Joan is diagnosed with breast cancer, Tom is there to support and we follow as they navigate the mundane and frightening new world of exams, diagnoses, and waiting rooms. Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson make vivid the subtle shifts of temperature that define long-term intimacy, as two people dealing in very different ways with acute stress and the continuing echoes of an earlier tragedy.

With a sober approach that avoids any slips into sentimentality, directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn capture both the extremity and the everydayness of cancer, in this warm and deeply affecting drama.