It’s a film to see for the performances, which are faultless, but while it’s sometimes riveting this play has been awkwardly translated to screen.
Tense and challenging, but only fitfully engaging.
What’s most unsettling and distasteful here is the relative sympathy with which Ray is treated. In spite of the devastation his behaviour causes, he is not simply portrayed as a monster. Nor is Una seen entirely as the victim.
A woman tracks down the man who abused her when she was 13, in a disquieting adaptation of David Harrower’s play Blackbird – with a neat, nauseous twist.
Rooney gives a forceful performance while Mendelsohn is creepily plausible as a man who seems both predatory and sincere in his feelings for the younger Una.
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