“A generation ago, Tourette syndrome was the butt of bad jokes,” said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. In this warm-hearted comedy-drama based on the life of the Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson, “it’s the source of all the good ones”. The film stars Robert Aramayo as Davidson, who was born in Galashiels in 1971 and began exhibiting symptoms when he was 10. It does not stint in showing us how hard it was to go “through the most awkward adolescence imaginable in an era when the condition was barely understood”; Aramayo also brilliantly conveys “the intense frustration and fatigue engendered by Tourette’s”.
Yet “I Swear” is “inescapably hilarious” too – “such is the weird power of swearing when the swearer can’t keep a lid on it”. The film opens in 2019, when Davidson is at Buckingham Palace to receive an MBE for services to mental health. Suddenly, his nerves get the better of him: “F**k the Queen!” he shouts in front of Elizabeth II herself. We then flash back to 1983, when young John (Scott Ellis Watson) is growing up; he is a confident boy, but then the tics start.
At school, he is marked out as different and the other children are brutal, said The Observer. Meanwhile at home, his “stony mother” (Shirley Henderson) treats him as an outcast.
Kind people, however, see beyond his syndrome and offer him a loving home, and later a job. “Beyond all the tragicomic plot peaks and troughs”, “I Swear” argues that John’s main problem was never the Tourette’s itself, but the “ignorance and hostility of other people”. This “neat and tidy” message is delivered a “little didactically”, but we do, in fact, leave the cinema feeling better informed by this funny, touching, feel-good film.
While ‘inescapably hilarious’, the drama also lifts the lid on John Davidson’s experiences with Tourette syndrome
