A Moral Man
2021 · 18m · UK
Directed by Paul Wade, Simon Wade
Genres: drama
Tones: provocative, tender, tense
A right-to-die evangelist must confront his own morality when a routine home visit to a terminally ill patient is thrown off course by a shocking revelation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Toby Jones doing assisted-suicide ethics in eighteen minutes — fine, the man can elevate a phone book. Inverting the POV to the advocate is at least a real choice, not just self-importance dressed as gravity.
Toby Jones in a chamber piece on assisted dying, told from the advocate's side rather than the patient's — that inversion is the formal gesture that earns my attention. The two-hander rigor recalls Andrew Haigh's smaller work.
Toby Jones in an 18-minute ethical drama about the assisted-dying advocate rather than the patient is a clean inversion — the page summary's pull-quote about grappling 'on a grand philosophical plane' while 'recognising death is an everyday reality' tells me the tonal balance is the whole game. With Jones, that's a bet I'll take.
Reviews
A Moral Man is a unique take on death and illness, wading into some fascinatingly blurry lines of morals and ethics.
An accomplished feat from writer-directors Paul and Simon Wade as they attempt to sincerely raise a difficult ethical question, enhanced by another exemplary Toby Jones performance.
Festivals
- Vancouver International Film Festival
- UK Film Review Festival 2022
- Leeds International Film Festival
- Cambridge Film Festival