Wendy Ide 

Love Without Walls review – overstretched homelessness saga

A young married couple lose everything in this well-intentioned but unfocused tale of doom
  
  

a man, looking over his shoulder, and a woman looking at him while she pulls on a trainer, on the pavement beside some railings, sat on cardboard, with a big bag
Niall McNamee and Shana Swash in Love Without Walls. Strike Media Photograph: Strike Media

Young, married and hopeful, Paul (Niall McNamee) and Sophie (Shana Swash) don’t have much to call their own: his guitar and dreams of a music career; her camera and photography studies; a beat-up Citroën 2CV; a moped; a modest home; each other. It’s enough. But the cruel vagaries of fate and an unusually punishing screenplay take everything from them, bit by bit.

Director Jane Gull’s follow-up to My Feral Heart is a well-intentioned but clunky doom saga. It’s certainly a pointed indictment of a society that can see a family caught in a cycle of homelessness – Love Without Walls covers similar territory to Paddy Breathnach’s sharper, more focused Rosie. But the combination of an overstretched running time, excessive use of querulous folk noodling on the soundtrack and uneven performances undermines its potency.

Watch a trailer for Love Without Walls.
 

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