Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022)

Two people, one hotel room, ninety minutes of conversation interrupted by the occasional act. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a sex comedy drama that behaves like a stage play with better lighting, and it runs almost entirely on the spectacle of Emma Thompson negotiating her own embarrassment in real time. Nancy Stokes, retired religious education teacher, widowed, fifty-five, has concluded that thirty-one years of missionary intercourse with a husband who found oral sex demeaning did not constitute a sexual education. So she hires Leo. The film's engine is her reclamation of pleasure, and that engine is hot. There is a thesis here about female desire, its long suppression, and the double standard that polices older women's bodies. The film states it plainly, and often.

The body acceptance arc is the second motor. Nancy's shame at her own aging flesh gets dismantled piece by piece, culminating in a quiet scene of self-pleasure and self-regard that the camera declines to flinch from. Leo's defense of his former pupils' hemlines, and the script's refusal to moralize about sex work, add a soft instructional hum beneath the drama. It lectures, gently, then returns to being a two-hander.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. No queer content. No racial thematics, and the mixed-heritage casting of Daryl McCormack goes unmentioned by the narrative. No climate anxiety, no neurodivergent characters, no historical revisionism. A woman directs, a woman wrote it, and a woman over fifty carries it as a romantic lead, which is a modest and specific kind of progress. The film is warm, well-acted, and content to be small. It asks nothing of the culture beyond permission to exist.