Pink Wall review: eviscerating anatomy of a relationship from Downton's viscount

Dir: Tom Cullen. Cast: Tatiana Maslany, Jay Duplass, Sule Rimi, Ruth Ollman, Sarah Ovens, T. J. Richardson. 15 cert, 82 min

There’s a bloodcurdling moment in the first scene of Pink Wall, a sharp, stinging relationship drama from actor-turned-filmmaker Tom Cullen, which pins your attention to the screen and keeps it there. The central couple, played to the hilt by Tatiana Maslany and Jay Duplass, are sat next to each other during a pub lunch in Wales, and a stray comment by her brother, who’s across the table, turns the atmosphere on a dime.

Maslany’s terrifyingly sudden rage at hearing the insult “cuck” (aimed at her boyfriend, implying he doesn’t wear the trousers) is something to behold. But then her whole performance is. This pair, Jenna and Leon, are in their fourth year of being a couple, and the film jumps back to give us the anatomy of their love story in non-linear fashion.

Year One is next, where we see them catch each other’s eyes across a crowded dancefloor, before stumbling into Leon’s apartment for a presumed one-night stand.

Each phase of this couple’s intimacy brings in new challenges. Graver doubts. Their sex life needs more and more work, until it starts to feel like work. Their career ambitions tilt on different trajectories. And they can’t seem to manage an open conversation about wanting children, a topic – on a park bench in Year Three – which they inch around like a sore spot, uncomfortably aware they’re not on the same page.

The Aberystwyth-born Cullen is most celebrated for his lead role in Andrew Haigh’s beautiful gay two-hander Weekend (2011), and more popularly known for playing a viscount in Downton Abbey. Through a process of absolute honesty with himself and his actors, he’s zeroed in on some impressively hard truths with this film, sculpting a debut which manages to be intensely serious and sad, while also witty in its details, acutely plausible, and intermittently hilarious.

Duplass, reliably funny, started his own career behind the camera on comparable indie projects, and knows every way to animate a prickly-yet-playful conversation. Leon is one of his most wounded, believable guys: there’s something poignant about his waistline, and even his ever-shifting hair and facial hair throughout, suggesting desperate experimentation on the brim of a mid-life crisis. When he pulls out all the stops to initiate sex, and Jenna can’t help but crack up at his rather hammy efforts, the intimate vibe peters out, but his hurt and frustration linger.

Maslany, meanwhile, is a dervish with intimidating dramatic range. A couple more roles like this, and a Michelle-Williams-esque profile ought to be well within her grasp. When she cuts loose, on a drunken bender with a girlfriend, she’s an exhilarating mess; but there’s epic discipline to her acting, too.

She’s always flashing us hints of what Jenna’s thinking, whether she fully articulates those thoughts or locks them away. The gendered expectations of entering mid-adulthood are like tectonic plates shifting below this particular relationship – the cause of a fragile equilibrium that Cullen, Maslany and Duplass are clearly probing from first-hand knowledge.

Pink Wall isn’t note-perfect – the title image, involving an indiscretion in a bar, comes off as slightly strained. But the circling conversations here reveal an amazing amount, in under 80 minutes, about everything these two want their lives to be.

There’s something surgical about the film’s rigorously compacted structure – it’s an anatomy of a relationship in shards, which keeps dissecting to see where it bleeds the most. Was *this* organ failure a low point? Or how about this one? The highs, meanwhile, are intoxicating – giddily so, romantically so – and the acting and writing take us on quite a ride.