This first screenplay by Irish playwright Owen McCafferty is inspired by his own wife's experience with breast cancer, and the smallest details are thoughtfully observed and portrayed with sympathetic honesty. Random encounters with other patients somehow become vitally important. Health care professionals are sympathetic but removed. A sweet, sad film.'Ordinary Love' stars Liam Neeson and the exquisite Lesley Manville in the story of a couple who are navigating the world of serious illness, the euphemisms and delays, from initial tests that are 'concerning' to the diagnosis: 'the results weren't what we hoped.' Then there is surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Perhaps it is partly Manville’s presence, which reminded me a little of Mike Leigh, in films like Another Year. But Manville and Neeson have a real empathy and intimacy on screen.

There are, arguably, scenes in this film which are less than subtle – and there were times when I wanted something more indirect. But there is a kind of redemption when the couple unexpectedly see someone they know – and dislike – in the waiting room. The uneasy, uncomfortable wait for Tom to return from the loo so they can all troop in to see the doctor is an ordeal of banal embarrassment. There is a horrible, and all too real, choreography of agony when Tom and Joan are placidly seated in the hospital waiting area and Tom announces he needs to go to the lavatory Joan testily tells him not to be long, because her name could be called at any moment – and course it is, the moment Tom has gone. Over the years, the couple have got comfortable with a kind of endless, soft-edged banter it’s a language they have developed for amiable co-existence, and of course it crumbles in the face of Joan’s awful news, replaced with anger, recrimination and fear. Cinematographer Piers McGrail gives it a stark, flat light: subdued in the couple’s kitchen and dining room, and also on the seafront where they go for daily, healthy walks, Tom genially obsessing over his Fitbit and the number of steps he has taken – but a stronger and more clinical light in the hospital.

Ordinary Love is a film with a cloud-cover of ordinariness. Joan, with deadly seriousness, tells him not to mention her cancer: “I don’t want her to know.” But this film does something different with the trope when the couple are in the car and Tom announces that he is going to the cemetery. It is, perhaps, something we have all seen before in the movies when a character goes to talk to the gravestone of a departed loved one.

And although there are some slightly stereotypical weepie moments, the film has a strong sense of emotional purpose and Manville and Neeson – perhaps especially Manville – bring conviction and force. The movie is written by Owen McCafferty and acted with impeccable intelligence and sensitivity by Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson.

Ordinary love and good will