Aimee Lou Wood made her screen debut, as the endearingly unfiltered Aimee in Sex Education, in 2019. It’s been a deservedly busy six years since then for the actor, involving three more seasons of Sex Education, co-starring with David Morrissey in the sitcom Daddy Issues, a major role in the triumphant third season of The White Lotus, plus stage and film work, too.
On the small screen, Wood specialises in vulnerability – the kind of characters who survive life despite having a layer of skin missing. You watch in the nail-biting hope that their courage will be enough to see them through and that the people they meet will be kind. It makes sense that Film Club, Wood’s first foray into writing (with Ralph Davis), is built round another variation on this theme.
Evie (Woods) and Noa (Nabhaan Rizwan, so good in everything and just perfect here) have been best friends since university, where they started a weekly film club that has endured ever since. These days it is usually just the two of them, a sweet, gentle, funny pair, dressing up in suitable costumes every Friday night after Noa clocks off work as a family lawyer, and enjoying their time together. Now, however, they do so in Evie’s mum’s garage because Evie hasn’t been able to leave the house since her “wobble” six months ago, the exact nature of which is gradually revealed over the six-episode run. Evie set-dresses the garage appropriately for the film every week (an abundance of tinfoil, tubing and bubble wrap for Alien, huge flowers and lollipops for The Wizard of Oz and so on). It is a cocoon, a refuge and potentially a dependency.
Then Noa is offered a job in Bristol and must take it. For the first time their friendship will be tested by distance, and the consequences of Evie’s agoraphobia made yet more oppressive. And, of course, it means any unspoken feelings that may or may not exist become harder to ignore. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and especially so when you cannot visit on a whim, or you spy hints of possible love interests on the new horizons one half of the unit is facing towards.
Around the central relationship, which does much to restore the lost art of yearning to its rightful place, are a variety of noisier ones offered by Evie’s family. There is her mother, Suz (Suranne Jones, most recently seen in the virtually back-to-back series Hostage and Frauds – it is Jones’s world now and we just live in it, which is absolutely fine by me), who is a wonderful creation. Fiercely loving, endlessly energetic and high-maintenance, you can see the fear for her daughter electrifying every nerve beneath the impeccably groomed surface. If she stops moving, she’ll collapse. She inadvertently terrifies Noa but has made Evie’s boyfriend, Josh (Adam Long), virtually part of the family. His is a simple soul whose sunny outlook and ever-readiness for an outing (“I think we need a good fat potter, Suz,” and off they go round the local department store) soothes the jangling in the maternal breast. Her other daughter, Evie’s sister Izzie (Liv Hill), has a darker outlook and drier wit that does not.
Film Club slots in to the growing subcategory of comedy about mental health, particularly women’s, written (or co-written) by women. It is perhaps not as dense or sophisticated as, for example, Aisling Bea’s This Way Up (about a twentysomething recovering from “a teeny-tiny nervous breakdown”), or Nancy Harris’s The Dry (about the whys and wherefores of alcoholism) and it is very different in tone from the brutally confrontational Such Brave Girls. But like all of them, it has a deep intelligence and psychological acuity underlying and informing all the jokes, and like them it also makes a point of looking beyond the suffering caused by mental illness to an individual and out at all the ways in which it can change dynamics and, especially without help, frustrate lives.
Film Club is a quiet, careful but confident thing. It was clearly written by two people who know where their strengths lie (above and beyond Wood’s startlingly accurate Buffalo Bill impression and Rizwan’s flawless channelling of Jeff Goldblum) and it is impeccably cast. A bit more torque and a bit less whimsy might be welcome, but that is to quibble. Wood’s star and CV continue to shine.
