I Swear

There is a scene early in I Swear where John Davidson walks into a job interview. Before he can say his name, his body betrays him. A tic rips through his neck, his arm jerks sideways, and a word comes out that he did not choose. The interviewer stares. John stares back. Robert Aramayo holds that stare for what feels like a full minute, and in his eyes you see every humiliation this man has ever swallowed, every room that went quiet when he walked in. It is the kind of moment that wins awards. It won a BAFTA.

Kirk Jones wrote, directed, and produced this film, and the most impressive thing about it is what he chose not to do. He did not make a disease-of-the-week movie. He did not make a triumph-over-adversity montage set to swelling strings. He made a film about a man who happens to have Tourette syndrome, and whose life is sometimes unbearable because of it, and sometimes unbearable for reasons that have nothing to do with it.

The real John Davidson was the subject of a 1989 BBC documentary called John’s Not Mad, filmed when he was sixteen and his condition was barely understood by anyone, including himself. I Swear picks up that thread and follows it through decades. Teenage years in a small Scottish town where cruelty comes easy. A family that loves him but does not always know how. A slow, stubborn discovery that the thing that made him different could also make him useful – as a campaigner, a speaker, a man who refused to be quiet in both senses of the word.

Maxine Peake and Peter Mullan play his parents with the kind of understated precision that makes you forget they are acting. Shirley Henderson appears in a smaller role that lands like a gut punch in the third act. But this is Aramayo’s film from the first frame to the last. You may know him as Elrond from The Rings of Power. You will not recognise him here. He spent months with Davidson and people living with Tourette syndrome, and the result is a performance that never once feels like imitation. It feels inhabited.

Jones shoots Scotland the way it actually looks. Grey skies, pebbledash houses, chip shop fluorescence. There is beauty in it, but he makes you earn it. The humour is real and constant, because Davidson himself is funny, disarmingly so, and the film honours that without ever using his condition as the punchline.

I Swear premiered at Toronto, went 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and took home two BAFTAs including Best Actor. It arrives in US theaters on April 24 via Sony Pictures Classics. If you are in the UK, it hits Netflix on March 10. Either way, do not miss it.