Nowhere Special

Nowhere Special (2020) comes from a real case, and the identity of the people involved was deliberately withheld. John is thirty five, cleans windows in Belfast, and is raising his four year old son Michael alone. He is diagnosed with a terminal illness. One task remains: find a family to take his son after he is gone. The film tells this as a series of interviews. John visits houses, listens to families, describes his own child to strangers. Some are wealthy, some are eager, some are there for the wrong reasons. Each meeting is short and each is harder than the last. The real subject is not the choice but John's inability to tell Michael anything. The boy knows nothing and never learns during the film. It is built on the silence of a father who does not know how to explain death. Uberto Pasolini never reaches for manipulation. There is almost no score, no scene of weeping, and the ending does not land where you expect. James Norton does the best work of his career, and Daniel Lamont opposite him really is four years old, which is where the naturalness of their scenes comes from. It runs 96 minutes. Good for: quiet British drama, father and son stories, and true events. Less good for: the subject is terminal illness and a child's future. Hard going for anyone with a small child.