Josh O’Connor and Laia Costa’s beautifully delicate and astute adult love story Only You was directed by Harry Wootliff in 2018. Now she’s back with a new complicated romance, adapted from Deborah Kay Davies’s True Things About Me, a humidly passionate story of amour fou, submission, and emotional self-harm.
This well-acted film features polished sensuality and unfulfilled desire set-piece sequences. However, there are instances when it seems like the performances and background ambience are going nowhere. The character development isn’t as in-depth or complicated as it was in Only You, and the story concludes with a weak and improbable ending in the third act.
Is “True Things” based on a true story?
“True Things” is a fictional story. “True Things” is adapted from Deborah Kay Davies’s True Things About Me, a humidly passionate story of amour fou, submission, and emotional self-harm.
In a claims office in a beach town, Kate (Ruth Wilson) has the tedious duty of questioning each and every aggrieved and belligerent claimant. Her friend Alison (Hayley Squires) went above and above to secure her this position, and she is already a little concerned and irritated by Kate’s consistent tardiness and poorly veiled sarcastic attitude.
Kate’s life is turned upside down when Tom Burke’s portrayal of a gloomy, arrogant, and extremely handsome young man who swaggers into an appointment while casually stating that he has recently served four months in prison for whatever reason transforms Kate’s life. He subtly asks Kate if he may take her out for lunch, and Wilson captures Kate’s enthusiasm when she accepts and defies office policy to meet him. Instead of eating lunch, they engage in raunchy sex in the multi-story parking lot next to his Mercedes (how does he afford a Mercedes?). He then convinces her to skip work so they can go swimming and engage in more sensual outdoor sex. She soon becomes angry with the boy, to use the song’s lyrics.
She tells him everything about herself but knows little about him, and then he begins to treat her carelessly, disappears for long stretches without contacting, and then demands that she quit everything at once. Kate stalks his address on Google Street View in a clingy and pitiful obsession. Then he airily claims that his Mercedes has unexpectedly stopped working, asks to borrow her automobile for a “business endeavor,” and then vanishes for a long time without returning it. Could he just be taking advantage of her? Could this be an instance of predatory abuse that has happened before? Because this unhealthy connection is more intense and genuine than everything else in Kate’s life, it’s possible that she doesn’t care.
The turning point occurs when Kate accepts the gloriously cruel lover’s invitation to fly with him to Spain, where his sister is ostensibly being married. However, he is not accompanying Kate; instead, he has just agreed to meet her at the airport when she arrives. The viewer is allowed to question at this point whether and when the mystery surrounding his past will be revealed, when we will meet this sister, or at the very least, when Kate will demand to see his family members.
The movie’s Spanish segment, however, falls flat in terms of both what is meant to be occurring and how it is intended to cause Kate to change. Wilson and Burke, who play a lady who badly wants to give and receive love and a man who has no understanding what any of that means, still provide astoundingly brilliant performances.