Film reviews: I Swear | A House of Dynamite | Good Boy | Souleymane’s Story

I Swear (15) ★★★★

A House of Dynamite (15) ★★★★★

Good Boy (15) ★★★

Souleymane’s Story (12A) ★★★★

You probably remember Scottish Tourette’s syndrome campaigner John Davidson, the real-life protagonist of I Swear, from John’s Not Mad, the landmark BBC documentary made about him in 1989 when was 16. Back then, public awareness of his neurological condition was virtually non-existent and the onset of involuntary tics, spitting and swearing that started to take over his life made growing up in the small Borders town of Galashiels — where he still lives — particularly tough.

That’s only a small part of his story, though, and writer/director Kirk Jones cannily begins this decades-spanning biopic with John (played by Robert Aramayo) receiving an MBE for his activism in 2019. Duly blurting out “F*** the Queen” at the ceremony, it’s an amusing moment that simultaneously sets up the inspirational, feel-good tone Jones is going for while giving us permission to laugh at scenarios in John’s life that are, at times, unintentionally funny. Thenceforth the film rewinds to dramatise the inexplicable onset of the condition — with John nicely played as a kid by newcomer Scott Ellis Watson — before jumping ahead again to focus on John’s efforts to navigate life as an adult.

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Though it can feel a little disingenuous not to dramatise, or even acknowledge, the making of the documentary in these early parts, that actually leaves Aramayo freer to capture Davidson’s unpredictable energy with empathy and humour as run-ins with the police threaten to further derail his life. Here, salvation comes in the form of his relationships with Dottie Achenbach (Maxine Peake) and Tommy Trotter (Peter Mullan) — the former a friend’s mum who all but adopts John when his own mother (Shirley Henderson) can’t give him the emotional support he needs; the latter the caretaker of a local community centre who gives him a job, despite John offering to make him a cup of tea with “spunk for milk” during his interview.

If the film gets a little broad in places, it’s good at drilling down into the reality of living with Tourette’s without stigmatising it, as in the moment when Aramayo is called upon to act opposite a teenage girl who actually has a similar form of Tourette’s to Davidson. The tirade of profanity they swear up together is like a primal scream of relief that they’re not alone.

A white-knuckle political procedural about an imminent nuclear strike on American soil, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite sees the Hurt Locker director zero in on the terrifying reality of a world in which mutually assured destruction is no longer the deterrent it used to be.

Taking a Rashomon-like approach to impending catastrophe by counting down the same 20-minutes-until-impact time-frame from different perspectives, the film kicks off by focussing on the soldiers manning an Alaskan missile defence outpost, before moving up the chain of command to various White House analysts, senior-level government officials, Pentagon generals and the president himself (Idris Elba) as the realisation dawns on everyone that the unidentified blip on their radar screens is no training exercise.

Each switch in viewpoint ratchets up the tension, with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s rigorously researched, jargon-heavy dialogue alighting on key phrases that underscore the extent to which the defence strategies supposedly keeping the world safe are predicated on odds little better than a coin toss. Meanwhile, Bigelow’s top-tier cast infuse their economically sketched characters with life beyond the claustrophobic confines of the setting, with Rebecca Ferguson especially good as a no-nonsense analyst whose discovery of her little boy’s dinosaur toy in her pocket becomes a potent metaphor for the extinction-level powers that have been at the world’s fingertips since 1945.

Micro-budget horror film Good Boy puts an entertaining spin on the haunted house movie by presenting the whole thing from the perspective of its canine protagonist, an adorable copper-coloured retriever named Indy whose human parents happen to be the film’s co-writer/director Ben Leonberg and producer Kari Fischer. Mostly keeping their camera at dog height, they manage to transcend the gimmicky pitch with an inventively executed story in which Indy’s heightened canine sensitivity detects an otherworldly presence in the house his owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), has inherited from his grandfather. Indy’s inability to articulate (beyond a bark or a whine) what we can see that he’s sensing keeps the unfolding horror pleasingly ambiguous. Scooby-Doo this ain’t.

Award-winning French drama Souleymane’s Story puts a human face on the immigration issue with a wrenching, kinetically told story about an undocumented Guinean refugee (Abou Sangaré) encountering exploitation at every turn as he works as a food delivery rider in Paris while preparing for his asylum interview. Shot largely on the fly amidst the chaotic Parisian traffic, it’s a visceral piece of filmmaking, with moments of levity alleviating the daily grind of its protagonist’s existence and its star — who’d never acted before — imbuing the titular Souleymane with the sort of kindness, compassion and dignity that the apps powering the gig economy make it too easy to ignore.

I Swear and Good Boy are in cinemas from 10 October, A House of Dynamite is on selected UK release now and available to stream on Netflix from 24 October; Souleymane’s story is in cinemas from 17 October.

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