By Sara Bright
So, Aimee Lou Wood has a new show out. Film Club. BBC Three. The premise is one of those things that sounds lovely on paper. An agoraphobic young woman in Manchester who can’t leave the house, but who recreates these incredibly elaborate movie sets in her garage every week for her friends. It’s sweet, it’s quirky, it’s got a bit of that cosy-sad vibe that television seems to love at the moment.
But can we just talk about the garage for a minute?
Because this is where the whole thing starts to wobble for me. For a screening of Alien, she covers the walls in tinfoil and fills it with smoke machines and industrial ducting. For The Wizard of Oz, it’s a full-on emerald city. And I’m just sitting there thinking… how? Not the money. But the sheer psychic energy. Where is this unemployed woman, in the grips of a serious mental breakdown, getting the will to essentially become a one-woman Secret Cinema every Tuesday? It’s not just unbelievable. It feels… un-British. It’s a Pinterest board fantasy of what a quirky mental health story should look like.
And this, really, is the problem with the whole show. It’s a collection of lovely, interesting-sounding ideas that don’t ever quite connect into a believable reality.
At first, I thought, okay, here we go. Another drama about mental illness. A deep dive into anxiety and isolation, seen through the lens of cinema. Aimee Lou Wood is a fantastic actor, she can do that kind of vulnerability better than almost anyone. But… it isn’t, is it? We’re told she “malfunctioned” and “lost the plot,” but we get almost no insight into what that actually means. Her obsession with the film nights isn’t even a symptom; a flashback shows she was just as intense about it at university, years before her breakdown. So the agoraphobia just feels like a label. A convenient narrative hook to keep her in the house, where the drama is supposed to happen.
So if it’s not really about mental health, what is it? A romcom?
Well, it tries. There’s the best friend, Noa, played with that trademark understated stillness by Nabhaan Rizwan. They have this whole shtick where they only speak to each other in movie quotes. They clearly have a bond. But is it a romantic one? I’m not so sure. The chemistry feels patchy, like they’re acting in two slightly different shows. She’s all raw-nerve emotion, and he’s so laid back he’s almost horizontal. It never really catches fire.
Look, the most believable stuff is in the family home. The bickering between Evie and her sister Izzie, the excruciatingly try-hard mum played by Suranne Jones, who is, of course, brilliant at being twitchily anxious. There’s a scene about the size of a tampon that feels real and funny and a bit gross. For a moment, you think this might be a properly sharp family sitcom, something in the vein of the mercilessly brilliant Such Brave Girls.
But it pulls its punches. It always retreats into sentimentality. It doesn’t want to be spiky. It wants to be nice.
The whole thing feels a bit like trying to assemble a piece of flat-pack furniture where the parts have come from three different kits. You’ve got a leg from a quirky romcom, a shelf from a serious mental health drama, and a handful of screws from a Mike Leigh film. You can see what it’s supposed to be. It looks charming on the box. But when you put it all together, it’s wobbly. It doesn’t quite know what its job is.
I’ve seen a lot of shows try to tackle this kind of territory lately, and the best ones have a real sense of grit, a core of messy truth. Film Club feels like it’s been sanded down. All the sharp edges have been removed, just in case. It gestures towards big, difficult subjects – anxiety, longing, family dysfunction – but it never really gets its hands dirty.
So what are you left with?
You’re left with a series of lovely-looking scenes. You’re left with Aimee Lou Wood being incredibly watchable, even when her character makes very little sense. And you’re left with that bloody garage. A perfect, implausible, beautifully lit garage that stands for what the show is, really. An aesthetic. A mood. A sweet, slightly sad idea that never quite becomes a story. It’s a show that wants to be about the movies, but it feels like it’s forgotten that the best movies, even the cosy ones, are always about something real.
