Eternal Beauty review – a gripping and peculiar story of love and mental illness
Actor Craig Roberts (Submarine) follows up his 2015 directorial debut Just Jim with Eternal Beauty, a gripping and peculiar story of love and mental illness.
Sally Hawkins stars as Jane, a woman living alone in a hellish British suburb. She suffers from depression and schizophrenia related to various traumas from her past, such as a botched beauty pageant and being jilted.
She is bullied by her family, except for her sister Alice (Alice Lowe) with whom she has a fragile bond. Just as her anxieties and delusions begin to peak, she meets the eccentric Mike (David Thewlis) in a doctor’s waiting room, and the pair fall in love. As healing as this seems to be for Jane, it creates new issues with her family.
Portraying mental health issues can always be a tricky prospect. If taken too far, it can feel uncomfortably performative. Eternal Beauty gets the balance right, portraying her viewpoint as a surreal and scary world of whispers and fridges with dismembered limbs. However, Jane herself is always sympathetic, a woman trying her best to make her way through a very dark place.
There’s something of early Tim Burton in the way Eternal Beauty presents the suburban ideal. Everyone in Jane’s life is problematic in some way – younger sister Nicola (the excellent Billie Piper) is dismissive of Jane until she needs something. In one darkly comic scene, she asks for notes on how to ‘act’ mentally ill in order to convince the benefits officer. Penelope Wilton is terrific as their mother, a cold, selfish woman who only adds to her children’s trauma.
Hawkins is one of our finest actors, consistently delivering performances that make you lean forward to get a closer look. Where another actor might have been full of jitters and screaming, the best parts of her performance are quietly mumbled or achingly awkward. A period in the movie where she seems convinced her son-in-law needs saving is hard to watch, as Hawkins dives headfirst into the delusion before realising something might be amiss.
Thewlis, another great character actor, brings a lot of energy to would-be musician Mike. Another person making sense of what they’re going through, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry when he absentmindedly reveals that “things were looking up… for about a month… a few years ago”. It’s a pleasure to watch as these two outsiders become a safe space for each other.
A creative take on some difficult subjects, Eternal Beauty cements Roberts as a director worth following, and offers another highlight for Hawkins’ stacked CV.
Eternal Beauty is available on demand from 30th November