A very strong performance by Agyness Deyn (which bodes well for her forthcoming turn in Terence Davies’s Sunset Song) lends credible heart and soul to this adaptation of Ray Robinson’s novel, intelligently written for the screen by Joe Fisher. Deyn plays Lily O’Connor, a young woman with epilepsy who leaves her north-eastern seaside home to go searching for her brother on the streets of London. Wherever she goes, Lily must be prepared for the onset of seizures, dramatically represented here with startling hallucinatory visuals, affectingly conjured by cinematographer Si Bell. Striving to place the audience inside Lily’s experience of a randomly interrupted life (the film boasts “significant input” from the Epilepsy Society), director Bryn Higgins makes us feel the cuts and bruises that Lily acquires during unexpected collapses, and share her sense of exasperation at the ambulance rides that merely get in the way of her primary purpose. While the narrative may suffer from a few too-cute contrivances, the overall air is heady and engulfing, with Deyn cutting a defiant figure – strong, resilient, irrepressible.
