Prima Facie review: Cynthia Erivo is amazing in important film about sexual assault trials

Prima Facie

    

Director: Susanna White

Cert: 15A

Genre: Drama

Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Ings, Toheeb Jimoh, Elizabeth Dulau, Harry Treadaway, Khalid Abdalla, Elliot Levey, Noma Dumezweni, Simon Russell Beale

Running Time: 1 hr 50 mins

Susanna White’s legal drama pivots around an uncomfortable irony: its heroine is an expert at dismantling women’s accounts of sexual violence, until she becomes one of the women she has spent her career discrediting.

Cynthia Erivo plays Tessa Ensler, an impossibly brilliant working-class junior barrister whose speciality in defending men accused of sexual offences has become child’s play. For her, cross-examination is a game and the law an elegant mechanism whose rules she knows how to exploit. Then a colleague, Julian (Daniel Ings), rapes her while on a date, and the machinery she so confidently wielded is turned against her.

Adapted by Suzie Miller from her enormously successful one-woman play (which Jodie Comer performed in Dublin), the film has important things to say about the grotesque imbalance of sexual assault trials, where complainants find themselves scrutinised as mercilessly as the accused. In Prima Facie, lingerie and wine are damning details.

Its courtroom climax is urgent and maddening, chronicling the prejudices embedded in a system that demands almost impossible standards of proof while making victims answer for their behaviour, their traumatised, imperfect memories, and their credibility.

Watching Erivo on the stand is deeply affecting. Watching her get there is less effective. Too often what thrived as a sustained theatrical monologue struggles to find its shape on the big screen.

The film flails around for familiar tropes, including odd musical interludes and postcard London locations. The dialogue is leaden. Some supporting characters are so lightly sketched that the viewer forgets they exist between appearances.

Erivo remains tremendous, navigating both the screenplay’s inconsistent use of interior monologue and Tessa’s transformation from striding professional invulnerability to bewilderment and devastation.

One can’t help but wish she were commanding the stage alone with Miller’s award-winning play, rather than making a case for this muddled adaptation.

In cinemas from Friday, November 13th