Sweet Sue: a good-natured low-budget tragicomedy

When children of well-known filmmakers enter the industry themselves, they are faced with a choice. Do they seek to create work so obviously different from their famous parent that comparisons are rendered obsolete (the Sofia Coppola approach)? Or do they acknowledge the inevitable influence of growing up within a body of work, and make films that exist in direct dialogue with that family history (à la Brandon Cronenberg)?

Leo Leigh seems to have chosen the latter route for his fiction feature debut, a good-natured low-budget tragicomedy which appears to consciously reference the collaborative work made by his parents: director Mike Leigh and actor Alison Steadman. Like many of their best-known films, Sweet Sue is a wry slice-of-life portrait, an East London-set character study revolving around three lonely people who are pulled together by circumstance into a temporary dysfunctional family unit.

A stylish pre-titles sequence introduces Sue (Maggie O’Neill), a middle-aged blonde bombshell who sits in a genteel Italian restaurant glugging red wine and crunching breadsticks, having just been stood up by her feckless boyfriend. A slow zoom followed by some tight handheld camerawork – perhaps a throwback to the director’s background in documentary (Leigh began his career working on gritty docs for Vice, such as Swansea Love Story, 2010, about young people affected by heroin addiction) – conceals Sue’s face for several minutes, so she appears at first depersonalised, an emblem of a certain kind of hard-edged Cockney broad, all brassy hair and red pleather jacket. As the alcohol sinks in, Sue begins to cause low-key chaos, disrupting the suburban couple at the next table (“No, no it’s our London night!”), but an eventual glimpse of her face – girlish, soft, wounded – complicates the picture of drunken menace. O’Neill brings an appealing mix of vulnerability and naivety to the role, which keeps the viewer on side even when Sue’s lack of impulse control leads to bad behaviour.

In the opening scenes, Leigh focuses on establishing the details of Sue’s isolated life, juggling her dispiriting work at a tacky party supply shop with a terminally ill brother and an ailing mother (Anna Calder-Marshall) who prefers her stuck up daughter-in-law (Hannah Walters) to her own daughter. At her brother’s funeral, Sue strikes up a conversation with a biker Ron (Tony Pitts) and, much to her family’s disapproval, is soon riding away on the back of his motorbike. A tentative courtship begins, with the two lonely souls heading to the seaside and getting cheerfully stoned, but their budding romance is derailed by the arrival of Ron’s twentysomething son Anthony (Harry Trevaldwyn, scene stealing), an aspiring dancer/influencer with a sugar daddy and a flair for drama. Initially thrilled that “my Ronald” has found a girlfriend, Anthony’s love-bombing of Sue quickly goes sour, and the escalating tension threatens to derail all three relationships.

Even without immediately knowing the filmmaker’s lineage, Sweet Sue’s immediate reference points are clearly bittersweet realist comedy dramas such as Happy Go Lucky (2008) and Nuts in May (1976), alongside, perhaps, the affectionately observed working-class stories of Clio Barnard and Shane Meadows. Drawing on techniques closely associated with his father’s filmmaking, Leigh co-devised the script with his cast, starting with a story outline and then working collaboratively to improvise dialogue. This approach yields some lovely moments – a funny, believably awkward “getting to know you” Thai takeaway dinner, a cringeworthy dance sequence worthy of Napoleon Dynamite – but between these sequences the story meanders, and there’s an overall sense of narrative aimlessness. 

Leigh has described how he wanted the film to feel as if it was crashed by Anthony, and certainly the arrival of Trevaldwyn at the 20-minute mark signals a change of direction. From this point onwards, Sweet Sue loses sight of its heroine, shifting focus to the tense interplay between the repressed father and his flamboyant son. That dynamic unfolds convincingly, with Pitts tentatively revealing the history nerd that lies beneath Ronald’s tough guy exterior, and Trevaldwyn leaning gleefully into his character’s self-styled himbo persona. But despite the well-observed performances and abundance of good lines, particularly from Trevaldwyn – “I would hate to go to prison. That’s like peak toxic masculinity isn’t it?” Anthony declares – there’s a sense that the film doesn’t quite go far enough, in terms of either humour or emotional depth. 

After those promising opening scenes, we never quite get inside the mind of the title character. Despite a likeable performance by O’Neill, Sweet Sue herself remains something of a mystery, an enigma wrapped in red pleather, red wine and vape in hand, trying and failing to find her people.

 ► Sweet Sue is in UK cinemas from 22 December.