Even if the script is sometimes heavy-handed, Bloom is an unrecognisable force as a survivor of church sexual abuse
Orlando Bloom has often looked perfectly happy with a Hollywood career, starring in movies as opposed to necessarily acting in them. But he outdoes himself in this British indie drama playing a man traumatised by childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a Catholic priest. There’s a kind of blunt brute force to his performance – and he looks almost unrecognisable, as if he’s using certain muscles in his face for the first time.
The film is a horror story: a disturbing, hard-to-watch ordeal with a lacerating script by Geoff Thompson, a sexual-abuse survivor who has written courageously about his own experience. Bloom is Malcolm, known to everyone as Malky, a nickname that doesn’t remotely suit him. He swaggers about full of rage, flying into a temper if anyone so much as looks at him funny. Malcolm works in the macho world of demolition, stripping old churches of fixtures and fittings before the bulldozers move in. Just in case you miss the point, his mum says over tea: “There’s a lot of churches. You won’t be able to knock them all down.” There’s a good deal of this sort of heavy symbolism, giving the whole thing an overcooked, oppressive feel.
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