I’m not sure where Aimee Lou Wood – the Stockport-born star of Sex Education and The White Lotus – got the idea for Film Club (Tuesday 7 October, 10pm, BBC Three), the new drama she has created with fellow actor Ralph Davis, but I’d be amazed if it’s drawn from her own life. Not because the fearlessly outspoken global celebrity plays a woman too scared to set foot outside her mum’s house in Manchester following a nervous breakdown, her only respite being a weekly movie night with uni friends in the garage. No. It’s the garage itself.
Each week, unemployed, agoraphobic Evie somehow finds the wherewithal to transform her garage into a spectacular film set. For a screening of Alien, this one-woman Secret Cinema wallpapers it with tinfoil and hazard tape and fills it with smoke, strip lights and acres of aluminium ducting. For The Wizard of Oz, it’s floor-to-ceiling emerald gauze, gingham curtains and dozens of human head-sized flowers. For The Shawshank Redemption, bars, laundry and personalised prison-style posters line the walls. I simply refuse to believe such breathtakingly wasteful party decor would ever appear in an actual British household. America, maybe. Britain? Not. A. Chance.
Evie lives with her sister Izzie (Liv Hill) and mother Suz (Suranne Jones), who is excruciatingly try-hard, desperate to keep both the mood and appearances up, up, up, lest her first-born backslide psychologically. When Evie’s best friend and most reliable film club companion Noa (Nabhaan Rizwan) reveals he’s moving to Bristol for work, Suz panics, fearing Evie will lose her raison d’être. She decides to put a manically positive spin on the news by hastily arranging a prosecco toast to Noa, during which she reads out a depressing poem Evie wrote about being a ghost when she was eight. Is this meant to raise her daughter’s spirits? Or force her to flee the house in embarrassment, thereby curing herself? Either way, it provides Jones with another opportunity to slip into the twitchily anxious mum mode she long ago perfected.
Film Club has the vibe of a romcom but not the substance. Evie and Noa clearly have a connection: their conversation is composed almost entirely of movie quotes, and it’s a small miracle they’ve both found someone willing to tolerate this mode of communication. But elsewhere, their chemistry seems patchy. Rizwan plays Noa in his trademark understated style, which means little detectable emotion, while Wood is all aquiver with feeling – though she seems more irritated by Noa than consumed by lust. Besides, she’s smitten with her boyfriend Josh (Wood’s real-life partner Adam Long), who seems too good to be true. He is, as we later discover in a bizarre subplot.
Just like the movies … Wood with Nabhann Rizwan as Noa in Film Club. Photograph: BBC/Gaumont/Ben Blackall/PA
Instead, the most believable bonds are located within the family unit. An early scene in which Izzie is alarmed by the size of her sister’s tampons (Evie: “Fine Izzie, I’ve got massive, wizened 28-year-old flaps”) has echoes of Such Brave Girls, Kat Sadler’s mercilessly funny sitcom about a ferociously dysfunctional mother-daughter-daughter trio. But that’s a red herring. Evie, Izzie and Suz do bicker, but Film Club turns out to be a far soppier affair.
All the moping around the house – which Evie does in a miniskirt and leather blazer, for some reason – plus a perpetually wittering matriarch reminds me of Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet. Yet while that film’s cosy awkwardness eventually gives way to bracing emotional depth, Film Club retreats into sentimentality. We never get much insight into Evie’s condition: as she confirms to a cheeky local lad (Adolescence’s Owen Cooper), she just “malfunctioned” and “lost the plot”. Her movie night obsession isn’t even a symptom of her unhappiness; in flashback, we see that she took it just as seriously at university seven years ago.
So Film Club isn’t actually about mental illness. It’s not really a love story, either. It’s not even about film buffs: the movies referenced here are all route-one classics. At the end of the day, it’s about a garage in Manchester, and what one woman unBritishly sticks on its walls.
