Second Coming

This home-grown drama charts the simmering tensions in a suburban London household, where wife and mother Nadine Marshall is keeping her pregnancy secret, because sexual relations have long since cooled with her husband Idris Elba. But if he's not the father, who is? The title certainly drops a hint, but playwright Debbie Tucker Green's first feature eschews a specifically Christian interpretation of these confounding events, preferring instead to unfold a story where the everyday and the spiritual are unexpectedly entwined. It's subject matter you'd associate with European arthouse fare - a Robert Bresson, or Krzysztof Kieslowski perhaps - yet the film also delivers an intimate, authentic portrayal of an ordinary Afro-Caribbean British family working their way through a draining emotional situation. Admittedly, the story's slightly too drawn-out, and Marshall's guarded protagonist less appealing than Elba's loving yet tormented hubby, yet overall this is a British film of rare ambition and imagination, which builds to a final image of heart-stopping grace.