BRIAN VINER reviews Prima Facie: Cynthia Erivo is superb... this is a fine film and all the more welcome for being so timely

Prima Facie: (15, 106 mins)

Rating: Four out of five stars 

The timing is accidental yet impeccable. Prima Facie, a film about sex crimes and the legal process, arrives in cinemas in the week in which Russell Brand was sent down for ten-and-a-half years and allegations against David Walliams were made public. What a striking coalescence of art and life.

I didn’t see the one-woman West End production of the same title, by the Australian playwright Suzie Miller, in which Jodie Comer was said to have given a mesmerising performance, so I can’t make comparisons. My guess is that the film is considerably less powerful given the need to populate the story with other characters, and without the electricity of live theatre.

Nevertheless, Cynthia Erivo is superb as junior barrister Tessa Ensler, who specialises in defending men accused of sexual assault, but whose faith in the law is fundamentally shaken when she herself becomes a victim of rape.

Prima facie, for those unaware, is a Latin expression meaning ‘at first sight’, which in a legal context refers to the minimum threshold of evidence required to support a case.

Miller has adapted her own play skilfully for the screen. There is the odd clunky line, which perhaps landed better on stage, for instance when a fellow lawyer tells Tessa, after her latest courtroom triumph, ‘I can see why you’ve been nominated for the Junior Barrister award.’ That feels artificial, superfluous.

But on the whole this is a fine film and all the more welcome for being so timely.

Tessa is such a rising star at her London chambers that, like a footballer, she is scouted by the opposition. A celebrated KC, played in cameo by Simon Russell Beale, wants to lure her away. But soon something stops her from shinning so purposefully up the career ladder. Her certainties about the law, and life itself, are shaken to their roots when she sees the courtroom from a new perspective: the witness stand.

If I offer much more detail than that I might be found guilty of issuing spoilers. Those new to Prima Facie should see it without knowing too much of what happens. But Erivo gets first-rate support (especially from Noma Dumezweni as Tessa’s mum, a cleaner). 

And let me also commend Susanna White’s restrained direction – she uses the camera to especially memorable effect in a scene in which Tessa returns, click-clacking in expensive heels through pebble-dashed council estates to the down-at-heel neighbourhood where she grew up.

Prima Facie is released in UK cinemas on November 13.