Una

Una was groomed by her next door neigh­bour Ray as a young teenag­er before being whisked off to a sea­side motel room on an ​‘adven­ture’ and then being aban­doned. As Una, Rooney Mara is brit­tle, con­fronta­tion­al and hid­den behind a cur­tain of dark hair. She is rogu­ish­ly han­dled by Ray (Ben Mendel­sohn), hav­ing turned up to his anony­mous ware­house in search of answers.

This sin­gle-loca­tion, hot­house play about being haunt­ed by a past that will not wash away was a trap for first-time direc­tor Bene­dict Andrews. When trans­pos­ing David Harrower’s text from the stage (known as Black­bird in that form) to the screen, he had two options, and both were rid­dled with risks.

The first option is to leave it as a stark, 90-minute con­fronta­tion that grad­u­al­ly revis­its decades of pain and con­fu­sion in a ster­ile break room. This would have undoubt­ed­ly felt absurd­ly con­fined and pos­si­bly con­trived. The sec­ond is Andrews’ even­tu­al choice and what makes Una a film that is nau­se­at­ing­ly tense to wit­ness but devoid of any kind of dri­ving ten­sion. He opens out the play, allow­ing the emo­tions and sto­ry to spill out of the room.

It often achieves the oppo­site effect to cre­at­ing some­thing more cin­e­mat­ic and fine­ly drawn, that explores the wide-reach­ing effect Ray’s abuse has had on Una. The spaces for explo­ration exist, the film hav­ing expand­ed the cast from two to 20 (Ray’s loy­al employ­ee Scott, played by Riz Ahmed, being one of them) to man­u­fac­ture some addi­tion­al com­pli­ca­tions: along with flash­backs to Una’s ado­les­cence, which often feel uncom­fort­ably voyeuris­tic and need­less­ly expo­si­tion­al. But these often feel emp­ty, as in Andrews’ hands, Una reveals all its secrets in the open­ing scenes, to an extent there remains lit­tle lit­tle rea­son to watch the fol­low­ing 85-or-so minutes.

In expand­ing the nar­ra­tive into his own bounds but still retain­ing enough, Andrews los­es the mys­tery of the play. The dis­cov­ery of what exact­ly hap­pened to Una is, in Harrower’s text, revealed through vague anec­dotes and o and com­ments that grad­u­al­ly sink under the skin in a sick­en­ing real­i­sa­tion. ​“Are you aller­gic to me?”, asked by Una when Ray starts rub­bing his eyes, is a mem­o­rable one.

As a first time direc­tor from the­atre, Andrews makes the mis­take of ren­der­ing the film at by rely­ing entire­ly on dull medi­um shots, adding a slight tilt when want­i­ng to show some con­trast in the pow­er rela­tion­ship – Una’s first glimpses of Ray sees a cam­era tilt down to look at her as she looks over the back of the chair. But while Andrews’ visu­als are unen­gag­ing, he is unde­ni­ably adept at direct­ing Mara and Mendel­sohn to gen­er­ate the cru­cial­ly unpre­dictable atmos­phere of the film.

At times, it is so shock­ing­ly intense that it has the pow­er to rip to tat­ters in an instant as it rat­tles with frayed nerves, hair­line cracks that grad­u­al­ly expand under the pres­sure until they final­ly shat­ter. It’s as brit­tle as the metaphor­i­cal glass box Una finds her­self con­fined in, unable to escape while Ray dis­ap­pears behind a new name and a cav­ernous ware­house. ​“The only thing I didn’t lose was my name,” Una says. If you look close­ly, you can see the cracks begin­ning to form.