Review: Rye Lane is slight but rather lovely

It’s slight but it’s also sweet and thoroughly likeable, a romcom which follows all the established patterns but still manages to be genuinely different.

You might not remember too much about it in a few weeks’ time, but it will certainly leave a warm glow, a rather lovely plunge into the world of two twenty-something Londoners who have been damaged by love but might yet end up being each other’s path to romantic redemption.

David Jonsson (Industry, Deep State) is Dom and Vivian Oparah (Class, The Rebel) is Yas, and they meet when Yas overhears heartbroken Dom sobbing in the loos at a deeply pretentious art show – sobbing not at the art on show, but at the gruesome break-up he’s just been through.

Kind-hearted Yas senses a fellow fractured soul – and they start to chat. And chat and chat and chat. Initially she’s all chirpy confidence compared to his long-faced sadness, but slowly you start to realise that she’s damaged goods too as they tell each other their back stories.

The flash of genius in director Raine Allen-Miller film is that their respective stories come to life, but not as simple flashbacks. Instead present-day Yas and Dom are back in their own and each other’s recent past as active participants.

There’s a fantastic scene where there is a whole theatre full of Dom’s reacting to Yas’s romantic debacle.

And so they are drawn into each other’s lives, Yas turning up to lunch with the girl who shattered Dom’s heart and the self-obsessed wally who replaced him; likewise Dom helps Yas gain access to her ex’s flat, ostensibly so she can retake possession of a treasured vinyl. There’s a confrontation – and it’s is all cleverly, neatly done.

Jonsson’s Dom oozes kindness while Oparah’s Yas is all brittle superficiality, hinting at what’s underneath. Initially she’s just a bit irritating, but soon you warm to her as she and he start to realise that their paths really are converging.

Of course, there are going to be plenty of obstacles. It was never going to run smoothly – and when things start to go wrong, the film breaks out of the single day when so much of it takes place. Which is a shame. It was working well.

Would it have been a better film for all happening on the one day rather than three quarters of it?

Probably, but there’s still so much to enjoy here – not least the London backdrops as they amble around Peckham and Brixton, taking in various shops and markets (in which of they encounter a fab little cameo from a big name in a stall with a name riffing on one of his greatest films).

And then it all ends up on the South Bank, looking lovely. In fact, there are three of them in this relationship, as Diana might once have said: the third being London itself.

There seems to be quite a run of horror films just at the moment all with plenty of blood gushing. Rye Lane might just be the perfect antidote – a lovely way to spend an evening, in rich, funny and sparky company.