Ticket link coming soon

When Jane (Sally Hawkins) is dumped at the altar she has a breakdown and spirals into a chaotic world, where love (both real and imagined) and family relationships collide with both touching and humorous consequences. A fluent, rhapsodic, dizzyingly inventive film, both structurally and formally. Slipping between two time frames – the present often glides into the world of Jane and her sisters in their late-teenager years – the action is further lent a shifting, kaleidoscopic quality for being seen through Jane’s eyes. As her mental health fluctuates and the voices in her head come and go, her very surroundings seem to ebb and flow: the palette lightens and darkens, décor transitions from shabby and oppressive to neat and sunny, and, as previously mentioned, costumes alter.

“Most movies that I’ve seen that tackle mental health or mental health issues, the protagonists are always the victim, or they’re deranged and possessed and it’s a horror film,” says Roberts. “I wanted to flip it. I’d rarely seen it where you’re like, ‘Oh, wait, wait – /she’s/ the normal one; everyone else is the one that’s not normal.’ I wanted to take this psychological element of it, and go, ‘this maybe isn’t a weakness. Maybe it’s a superpower.’”

PRODUCTION STORY

Jane, the character at the bruised and beautiful heart of Eternal Beauty, presented herself to writer director Craig Roberts while he was editing his 2015 directorial debut JUST JIM. The middle sibling of three sisters, she is a paranoid schizophrenic who lives in the shadow of a domineering mother, and who regularly receives odd, ominous phone calls (at least when she stops taking her medication) from a mystery man – perhaps her first love who left her at the altar. “The character came fully formed,” says Roberts. “I just kind of knew those people, to be honest. I wrote some of it while I was in the edit of JUST JIM, but then I went away to do an acting job where I was stuck in a hotel in Atlanta for a long time, and basically wrote it in a month.”

Do consider also donating to our Heroes Fund– each $8 donation guarantees a free ticket to an essential worker when we resume physical screenings