I Swear (2025)

Kirk Jones has made a film about a man who cannot stop swearing, and he has done it with a straight face and a soft heart. I Swear follows John Davidson from a Galashiels childhood in 1983, where a belt across the knuckles from a head teacher arrives well before any diagnosis, through decades of tics, expulsions, a suicide attempt, a wrongful assault charge, and eventually an MBE. The condition is the film's entire subject, and it is rendered in granular, unglamorous detail: the spitting at dinner, the insults shouted at strangers, the exhausting arithmetic of getting through a single library visit. That is the picture's real accomplishment, and it is a substantial one.

The casting question hangs over proceedings. Aramayo gives a performance of genuine control, having spent three months in Galashiels with Davidson himself, but the role of a disabled man is played by an able-bodied actor, which tempers the film's claims to authenticity. The closing footage of the actual Davidson is a graceful gesture and a partial corrective. Around him, Maxine Peake and Shirley Henderson do unsentimental work as the mother and the nurse who first sees him clearly, though the film's interests are filial and medical. The working-class setting under Thatcher is present and felt, and the institutional cruelty is vivid, but class sits as backdrop. Race and sexuality do not enter the frame, and the film does not pretend otherwise.

Where the picture leans forward is in its final movement. The school talks, the police-station sessions, the Tourette's workshops, and the postscript about societal management all nudge it from drama toward advocacy. This is mostly earned, since the drama has done the work first, and the sermonizing stays brief. Still, the closing plea lands with the weight of a public service announcement stapled to a good film. We are left with a portrait of endurance that is honest about the body and a little too eager about the lesson.