Very intelligently shot on what is clearly not a lavish budget, this film punches way above its weight. Catch the Port Talbot scenes with the screen broken in half and the follow up split screens later - the story is being intelligently told through its visuals, echoing the theme of the characters - so many things split them apart, but clearly in the end the heart has its reasons. Love is Thicker Than Water has a very big heart indeed. It isn't unconventional in its plotting - a "meet cute", followed by a rapturous series of encounters both emotional and sexual, then the meeting with both sets of parents (slight clouds on horizon),then the deaths, then the severe conflicts. And so on and so on. But the uptown girl/downtown boy meme is handled entertainingly (she's Jewish, he's Welsh) and both actors are so funny and delicious and their scenes together are so spontaneous that I was convinced that they weren't rehearsed but were rather a brilliant bit of improv. (As Lydia Wilson and Johnny Flynn are both highly professional actors I concede that that is unlikely). Talking about professional actors, the whole cast is brilliant from the Big Names down to the very tiny parts. And the director(s),writer(s) and editor(s) are very secure in what they are trying to achieve so there are no moments where you think - WTF. The animation which is Arthur's thing as well as Vida's cello playing thing are interesting and convincingly portrayed and provide a metaphor for how the relationship shifts from one pole to the other without collapsing. It's not a pessimist's film I'm delighted to say but it never promises happiness ever after - so it's for the hopeful realists among us. Enjoy. Extra Bonus - the music.

Excellent acting. Considering it was a low budget film is was very cleverly crafted. I didn't take terribly to Vida but her character added gravitas to their relationship. Certainly wouldn't describe it as a romcom; it was complex and veiled in deep sadness. I really want to see how their lives progress.

He literally urinates on 'art'. It seemed the conflict stemmed from how they faced the pain of their lives; the Jewish generational trauma was either corrected, understood, or experienced through art. The film's thesis was explained via the anecdote relaying the grandmother playing music for the gas chamber victims, and then how the horror in dealing with life passed across generations... the mother gave up music so lives in hell through empty affairs. (She was rather grim, rotted as a consequence of giving up her 'art'.)

Art is the great divine redeemer across this, as in so much of cinema. This opposed to the working class head down, drink and deal that the film seems less interested in. This brings Vida's impulse to read him, to know his pain and see it as the therapy in expression. The creative family are all suffering, there is no solution, and they work it out as culture in art (hence its constant fixation on ritual). The film's collage florid pace and staging made it go by nicely. Vida pursuing medicine as opposite her mother she was hiding within the art and needed grounding, answering why she so loved him.

It made me wonder if they concede it's impossible to know another and art is closer than language. Why it puzzles him is why he's drawn to her with both the stoicism and directness of his family, not in any sense living through abstraction. What she may not have realized is she herself is his artistic escape. That she switched from mother to father pursuing medicine with her mother's death, choosing selflessness for others, rather than selfishness in art... and why the lovers so needed each other: both choosing reality externally but each other internally for their own private creative fulfillment. I think they'll make it within their twin fantasy as outside themselves it will always end with attempting to seek the other.

'Life is not perfect but the children...' as in this correcting symbol of humanity, the blank slate, another expression of this 'ideal.' The ritual of the dual funerals. All the formalities. 'Do you actually care?' Except she needed him to feel a little less to balance and understand her grief. Ellie Kendrick wanting to be a jet pilot is so comically great; the creatives go to the extremes of their imagining. Because it's all or nothing and the imagination conceives the furthest extent. I live through such proclamations. The brother unleashed with his gayness once the mother's repression had lifted brings its symbols home once more.

I found the film truly special, every bit of it reads and the areas of disconnect are the difficulty in knowing another. The Vida performance is so good that I can't imagine it's a performance at all, I can't conceive of this person not being her.