I Swear (2025)
Making a film about Tourette Syndrome takes a particular kind of nerve. Get it wrong and you have either tragedy-porn or a condition played for cheap laughs. Kirk Jones, the writer-director who gave us Waking Ned Devine, threads this needle with something approaching surgical precision — and makes it look easy, which is the hardest trick of all.
The story is real. John Davidson grew up in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders, was diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome at fifteen during a decade when most people had never heard of it, and eventually became one of Britain’s leading advocates for Tourette’s awareness, receiving an MBE in 2019. The film opens briefly on that moment of royal recognition before rewinding to the 1980s, where a young John is navigating school, family, and a body that refuses to behave itself in public. What follows traces his journey from an isolated teenager dependent on heavy medication to a man who discovers, through unlikely friendships and considerable pain, that there may be something to do with a life beyond merely surviving it.
Robert Aramayo plays the adult Davidson, and in my opinion this is one of the finest performances in a British film in years. The distinction that matters is this: Aramayo plays the man, not the condition. The tics are there, rendered with physical and emotional precision, but they are never the point. What registers is the person behind them — the frustration, the dark humour, the occasional fury, and the stubborn refusal to disappear. Scott Ellis Watson, a complete newcomer, handles the younger John with a steadiness that many experienced actors would struggle to match. Maxine Peake as Dottie, the woman who becomes both John’s advocate and his anchor, brings warmth without sentiment. Peter Mullan, as the gruff workplace ally Tommy, contributes the kind of lived-in, understated comedy that reminds you why he is one of Scotland’s great underused screen presences.
Jones directs with a restraint that suits the material well. He favours small, specific moments over operatic revelation: a room that tightens, a look that lingers half a beat too long, a silence where a response should be. The Scottish setting is rendered without nostalgia or condescension. This is a working-class community observed accurately, which is rarer than it should be.
There are weaknesses. The relationship between John and his mother, played by Shirley Henderson, feels incompletely drawn at a point in the narrative where more development would have paid real dividends. Some of the film’s later passages show the machinery of uplift operating a fraction too visibly, the gears of affirmation turning with just enough audibility to remind you that someone has calculated the emotional effect. These are not fatal flaws, but they are real ones, and a film with this much confidence elsewhere could perhaps have pushed a little harder in the places where it settles.
What the film does say, and says without hedging, is that ignorance is not an excuse for cruelty, only an explanation of it. That may sound like a modest insight. In the context of what John Davidson actually endured across several decades of public and private misunderstanding, it is anything but. The film’s insistence on this point, made through accumulated small moments rather than speechifying, gives it a moral seriousness that earns rather than demands its emotional rewards.
Funny, fierce, and unexpectedly moving. I Swear is instructive art made with genuine conviction, and it earns every tear it draws, of which, by all accounts, there are rather a lot.