Moral maze

Una is a psychological drama about a woman who was abused by a man when she was 12, and who confronts him 15 years later, and it’s a hoot. I’m toying with you. Of course it isn’t. It’s disquieting. It’s disturbing. It’s difficult. It’s 90 minutes of uncomfortably shifting in your chair and wishing you were at the latest heist caper that doesn’t make sense. But it is also compelling, up to a point, and your responses will be so complicated that you won’t know where to start unpicking them. Or how.

The film is based on the play Blackbird by the Scottish playwright David Harrower, which has won multiple awards and starred Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams on Broadway. A two-hander originally, here the cast has been expanded to include other characters, while the external world has been expanded beyond one room, as would have to happen if you’re not simply going to plonk a camera in front of the play and call it a day. (Although, in some respects, one wishes they had.)

Directed by Benedict Andrews, the theatre director who staged Blackbird in Berlin, and for whom this is a first film, it opens with a wordless sequence which tells us that 27-year-old Una (Rooney Mara) is not in a happy place. We see her clubbing. We see her have sex in a toilet with some stranger. We see her cut a lonely figure as she returns home in the early hours. Home is suburban Surrey, where she lives with her mother (a throaty Tara Fitzgerald). Mara is American, of course, but plays English here, which is jarring initially, if not plain weird, but this will prove the least of your worries.

Next, we see Una drive to a manufacturing plant, where she asks for ‘Ray’.