Alex Lawther gave a compelling portrayal of the young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game two years ago, and his character here is almost a modern-day equivalent. Elliot is a fey, literate, closeted teenager, given to wandering lonely as a romantic poet in the French countryside, in his vintage army jacket, while his clearly distraught mother (Juliet Stevenson) packs up their holiday home and her marital dreams. “You’re a bit of a cliche,” Elliot’s new French buddy/boy-crush observes, pre-emptively. The dynamics are given plenty of time to play out in this delicate, somewhat laboured character drama, which could almost be seen as a hymn to the great British art of not really talking about stuff. But there are just enough unanswered questions and bursts of dramatic incident to stop us wandering off ourselves.
