Real

Actor Aki Omoshaybi’s sweet­ly earnest debut fea­ture is undone by its attempts to apply dra­mat­ic con­ven­tions to the most banal aspects of life. Set in London’s grey urban sprawl of hous­ing estates, cor­ner shops and anony­mous streets, it is pow­ered by the ten­sion caused by lies spo­ken at the begin­ning of a new rela­tion­ship. Sin­gle mum Jamie (Pip­pa Ben­nett-Warn­er) and the pro­tag­o­nist Kyle (Aki Omoshay­bi) have a thor­ough­ly mod­ern meet-cute.

They are both in line at a shop. She is attempt­ing to make a pur­chase using her deb­it card, how­ev­er the card machine doesn’t work. He steps up to pay her bill with cash then chas­es after her and implau­si­bly enough, she coughs up her num­ber. Both par­ties instinc­tive­ly lie to each oth­er, and while she comes clean soon enough, he main­tains the front that he is a solic­i­tor, when the truth is that he is unem­ployed, with a crim­i­nal record and liv­ing pre­car­i­ous­ly thanks to a child­hood trau­ma that unfolds in for­mu­la­ic flash­back instalments.

Omoshay­bi stitch­es togeth­er a film-world out of the fab­ric of nor­mal­i­ty – dates in parks, the lights fus­ing, hav­ing a phone stolen – and the most endear­ing moments arise when he focus­es on the sim­ple premise of two peo­ple try­ing to be there for each oth­er. How­ev­er, despite the title, none of it feels remote­ly real. There is no under­stand­ing in Omoshaybi’s script of the sever­i­ty with which Kyle’s decep­tions, once they sur­faced, would psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly impact Jamie.

As such, her char­ac­ter feels glib, while his is flat­tened by heav­i­ly sign­post­ed bag­gage. There is the seed of a mov­ing idea here, and a sense that if Omoshay­bi had let his true inter­ests breathe instead of sti­fling them beneath sto­ry­telling clich­es, this film would have come alive. Instead Real chugs along with no sur­pris­es and, despite a com­mit­ted per­for­mance by Ben­nett-Warn­er, the cen­tral rela­tion­ship is not con­vinc­ing enough to drum up a roman­tic atmosphere.