Amazing Grace – Review
Some films announce themselves with scale, and others just sit you down in a room, introduce some people and trust you to stay. Amazing Grace is firmly the second kind, and it’s one of the most affecting British dramas I’ve seen in a long time.
Directed by Ruth Carney in her feature debut, and written by Daniel P. Lewis, the film follows Grace (Hannah Walters), a volunteer on a crisis helpline, who forms an unexpected bond with Walter (Lewis), a man isolated, in deep pain and close to the edge. As their conversations deepen, we learn what Walter has spent his life trying to outrun, and what it might take for him to start facing it.
It’s pretty much a two-hander, and everything rests on the pair of them. Walters shines in her first lead role in a feature. Her Grace is patient and warm without ever tipping into saintliness, and she does a lot of her best work simply listening, letting a flicker of worry or a held breath say more than a line of dialogue could. Lewis is outstanding as Walter, a man carrying childhood trauma, addiction and a bone-deep loneliness, and he plays it with a raw, unguarded honesty that’s often hard to watch and harder to look away from. The two of them are so good together that you stop thinking of it as acting at all.
James Nelson-Joyce, meanwhile, is quietly menacing in support as Walter’s “friend” Karl. He’s effortless in his scenes, bringing a low, unsettling charm that makes you uneasy the moment he walks in, and the film is all the better for how little he has to do to get that across.
The themes here are heavy going: suicidal ideation, childhood trauma, abuse and violence all feature, and it’s fair to say this isn’t an easy watch. What impressed me is how carefully the film handles them. It never feels exploitative or gratuitous, and there’s a sincere, hopeful streak running through the bleakness that stops it from becoming relentless. Carney keeps things intimate and grounded, Daniel Patrick Vaughan’s cinematography is beautiful in its grimness, and the Merseyside setting adds to the lived-in, human feel of it all, which is even more striking when you learn it was shot in around eleven days on a limited budget.
At just under an hour and a half, it never outstays its welcome and doesn’t feel long at all, but it lingers well after the credits roll. I found myself still thinking about certain scenes the following morning, which is always the sign of something that’s done its job properly.
Amazing Grace is a gripping, poignant piece of work, powered by two superb central performances and handled with real care. It has a message and it deserves to be seen.
Amazing Grace is in UK cinemas from 6 November 2026, courtesy of Screenbound Pictures.
