This bleak, stark debut feature from writer-director Leo Leigh bears the obvious influences of his parents Mike Leigh and Alison Steadman; it has a barbed cartoony unhappiness, a depiction of its characters verging on caricature and misanthropy but not quite, and the notes of redemption offered at the end are ambiguous. It is not a theatre of cruelty so much as a theatre of mockery; a world where a lot of the time absurd people are laughing at the absurdity of others, partly – but not wholly – because of how unhappy they are.
Leigh allows us to see how the tonal sourness challenges the adjective in the title. Maggie O’Neill plays Sue, a woman who runs a (depressing) children’s party shop hiring out balloons and banners, and she likes red wine. Her relationship breaks up and at the funeral of her brother, a keen biker whose corpse is carried in an engagingly surreal sidecar-hearse, Sue defiantly gets flirtatious with Ron (Tony Pitts), one of the biker mourners. Ron is a great big macho bear of a guy who turns out to be divorced, with a son Anthony (Harry Trevaldwyn) who is an exquisite queer butterfly: a dancer, a social media YouTuber and a narcissist in a dysfunctional relationship with a doting sugar-daddy figure (Jeff Rawle) who isn’t getting much or any sex out of it.
Ron and Sue go and see a mate of Ron’s and shriek with spiteful laughter at his recent breakdown following his mum’s death which involved taking off his clothes in a moonlit forest. Later, having got on well with Anthony, Sue will see his dance moves and, before she can stop herself, laugh cruelly at them; then she sees a video he’s posted, angrily calling her manipulative. Ron himself is clearly uneasy with his son’s identity and dance career but hasn’t got the emotional language to mock it in this way – although his son gloomily mocks his dad’s behaviour backstage, and Sue non-spitefully but still uncomprehendingly mocks Ron’s intellectual interests in history.
There’s a strange emotional dynamic here, although there is something interesting in Leigh’s refusal to bow to the bland injunction to make characters relatable. And there is a kind of redemption or forgiveness at the end – but partial – and there is something intriguing in the way Leigh withholds any reassurance that these people have changed or that they always had inner decency or kindness.
• Sweet Sue is released on 22 December in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema.
