After Love

Dover, on the English coast. Mary converted to Islam when she married Ahmed, a ferry captain, many years ago. She wears the hijab, speaks Urdu, and has built her whole life around him. Then Ahmed dies suddenly. Days after the funeral, going through his phone and his wallet, Mary finds the trace of another woman, just across the Channel in Calais. She takes the ferry. When she knocks on the door, the Frenchwoman who opens it mistakes her for the new cleaner, and Mary does not correct her.

Aleem Khan made this as his first feature, and it is a remarkably assured debut: quiet, precise and full of feeling. The film moves between two houses and two women who have loved the same man without knowing about each other, and the white cliffs of Dover, slowly crumbling into the sea, become the perfect image for a life that is coming apart. Joanna Scanlan, better known for British comedy, gives a staggering performance as Mary. Almost everything happens on her face, grief, anger, curiosity and an unexpected tenderness, and she won the BAFTA for Best Actress.

It is a film about grief and betrayal, but also about identity: what is left of you when the person you shaped your life around turns out to be someone else? It never goes for melodrama. Instead it finds something surprising and generous in the encounter between the two women, and in the teenage son caught between them. A small, devastating, beautiful film. A must see.