Ordinary Love (12A)****

Dirs: Lisa Barros D'Sa, Glenn Leyburn

With: Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville, David Wilmot

Runtime: 92 minutes

TOM and Joan, a long time married, look the very picture of ordinary love. They like to go for walks, bicker gently about how much he drinks, when to take the Christmas decorations down, all that sweet and low domestic jazz.

Then one night in the shower, Joan finds a lump. We’ll cope, they say, people like them always do. But just as there is no such thing as an ordinary person, so it is with Tom and Joan’s marriage. This is not the first time they have been tested.

In the hands of anyone other than Lesley Manville (left) and Liam Neeson, this story of living with cancer, brutally honest in parts, could well be unbearable, and will be to some. Yet at the same time it is such a delicately written, beautifully performed, and well-intentioned piece it demands to be seen. Manville and Neeson really do seem to have been together forever, two souls genuinely lost at the prospect of life alone. No ordinary film indeed.