Written and directed by Paul Wade and Simon Wade, a right-to-die evangelist must confront their morality as a routine visit is thrown off course by a shocking revelation. Starring: Toby Jones and Claudie Blakley.
One of the greatest things a film can achieve in today’s highly saturated landscape is to be different, unusual or unexpected, Paul Wade and Simon Wade tick that box with A Moral Man. It leaves you very quickly unsure of what to do with it, how to interpret its story, its questions of morals and its strange atmosphere. Before you even do start to unpack its layers, you can feel that there’s something deeper and dark at work. There’s a haunting stillness to it that elevates the everyday to encapsulate the complex themes to A Moral Man’s story.
A big part of that are the performances from Toby Jones and Claudie Blakley, both portraying characters with complicated histories. Firstly, Jones is one of those actors who can make you question everything about his characters, leave you unsure of their trustworthiness before revealing their true nature. Then Blakley presents a calmness mixed with intense vulnerability, which deepens the melancholy nature to the atmosphere. Together the two of them embark on what becomes a grey area of ethics and morals mixed with an exploration of compassion and empathy.
Part of the questioning air to A Moral Man is how the visual strikes a sharp, almost suspicious tone. It exists in the everyday, your average home but the cinematography adds a sombre edge, it digs its way under your skin. The filmmakers create a curious note, leading you in the direction they want but also leaving you constantly unsure of what more it has to reveal.
A Moral Man is a unique take on death and illness, wading into some fascinatingly blurry lines of morals and ethics. There’s an intriguing, strange nature to its feel, a heaviness or darkness that lingers in the background. All of its myriad of questions and emotions are brought to life superbly by the performances from Toby Jones and Claudie Blakley. It’s the type of short that different people might not always take away the exact same thing from it, but ultimately it feels like a debate of where the lines lie between compassion, empathy and morality.
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