Rare Beasts, review: Billie Piper’s ‘anti-romcom’ has a swipe at Laurence Fox

• Dir: Billie Piper. Starring: Billie Piper, Leo Bill, Toby Woolf, Kerry Fox, David Thewlis, Lily James. 15 cert, 90 mins

It’s one thing to make a film about neurosis; quite another to make a film that itself feels on the brink of neurotic collapse. Unfortunately, Billie Piper’s directorial debut falls into the latter category – or rather cannonballs right into it, eyes wild and nostrils flaring.

Billed as an “anti-romcom”, Rare Beasts charts the romantic, familial and professional travails of Piper’s Mandy. The single mother of an adorable but challenging young autistic son (Toby Woolf), she lives with her chain-smoking mother (Kerry Fox), who’s estranged from Mandy’s hard-drinking father (David Thewlis) – bleak working-class caricatures, the pair of them – while working at a trendy media company, pitching ideas to men for television shows about women.

She is also in a relationship of sorts with her colleague Pete (Leo Bill), a posh, scrawny, spluttering misanthrope who – intentionally or otherwise – bears a conspicuous resemblance to Laurence Fox, the actor turned politician and Piper’s former husband of eight years.

The film opens on one of their excruciating dates, with Pete in full sexist-dinosaur flow (women these days “want their dinners on the table” and “have more testosterone coursing through their veins than blood”, apparently) and Mandy sniping back when he stops to draw breath. Their profoundly irritating conversation sets the tone for all that follows: it’s caustic and self-deprecating but also mannered and laborious; closer to a couple of writers squabbling on Twitter than a face-to-face interaction between human beings.

Pete is an obvious nightmare, but at least Mandy knows where she stands with him, and that apparently makes him good enough. So the two congeal into an item, and a round of couple’s engagements ensues: day trips, dinners with friends, and a glamorous wedding overseas, with a brief appearance from Lily James as a bride who blithely describes herself as “post-post-post-feminist” – a typically not-not-not-funny line.

Time and again, Rare Beasts resorts to the old trick of having these scenes of madcap dysfunction unfold to ironically serene or upbeat music – a technique that quickly wears thin, and leaves the film’s brand of metropolitan-shabby-chic ennui feeling all the more performative. In one such sequence, a family outing to London’s South Bank, Mandy’s son has an autistic meltdown – and Pete, at the end of his rope, starts yelling and thrashing on the ground beside him, while a small crowd of onlookers gathers. I found myself gnawing my upper lip with embarrassment, but on the film’s behalf, rather than its characters’.

If Rare Beasts has two things going for it, they’re ambition and timeliness. Its manic set-pieces are shot and performed with no little nerve – while its particular type of anti-heroine, the young urban British woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is certainly having a cultural moment.

The trouble is, Rare Beasts lacks the razor wit, merciless candour and stylistic panache of Fleabag and I May Destroy You – not to mention Piper’s own Sky Atlantic series I Hate Suzie, made after Rare Beasts with the playwright Lucy Prebble, and broadcast last year. You can imagine Mandy going on to channel her own experiences into such a film or show, though you’d hope the result would be less of an ordeal than this.

In cinemas from Friday