The Trouble with Jessica

It’s disarmingly strange and freewheeling in tone, undercut by a ruthlessly dark humour.

The film may be full of holes but it’s highly quotable.

What the movie does have going for it is a terrific performance by Shirley Henderson...

The Trouble with Jessica is a masterclass in small-scale storytelling.

It might be more entertaining if mounted as a stage play and directed more for laughs&#59; in movie form, it falls flat.

Perhaps viewers who belong in the same tax bracket as these characters will be able to identity more with them and their situation, but that’s kind of why The Trouble with Jessica ultimately doesn’t work.

The pleasures of this black comedy about London real estate and the hypocrisies of posh professionals lie in the terrific cast, especially Shirley Henderson, embodying entertainingly horrible people.

Mixing slapstick with dark drama, this offbeat British film is tricky to connect with on a satisfying level. But that seems to be intentional, as director Matt Winn delights in putting his characters through a moral and legal wringer.

Despite its alluring premise and fantastic cast, the trouble with this film is that it unfortunately falls short of delivering on its initial promise.

All this is presumably meant as a satire on the middle classes, but actually the big middle-class joke is the film itself: clunkily theatrical, with horrible, complacent characters...