Since his breakthrough role playing opposite Florence Pugh in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth, Cosmo Jarvis has rapidly become one of the more familiar leading men in British independent cinema. He’s subsequently gone on to impress in Calm with Horses, Nocturnal and Farming, amongst others. Netflix subscribers may have also seen him playing Wentworth in Persuasion. In It Is in Us All, he gives his most nuanced performance yet.
After the death of his aunt, who he never met, Hamish Considine (Jarvis) arrives in Ireland. The country of his mother’s birth. As he travels across the west of the country, the outsider gradually begins to feel a sense of connection with this unfamiliar land. However, this reverie is shattered when he’s involved in a fatal road accident. While he’s nursing his wounds, Evan (Rhys Mannion) comes into his life. The teenager who survived the crash which killed his best friend.
It Is in Us All is a slow-burning drama about grief, belonging and family. There is much to contemplate in writer/director Antonia Campbell-Hughes’ debut feature. It’s a meditation on the human condition. One which considers the impact of multiple factors on the human psyche. Home, detachment, family, loss, loneliness, isolation, to name but a few. However, it will perhaps be for Piers McGrail’s haunting cinematography that It Is in Us All will be remembered.
It Is in Us All opens in UK cinemas on 23 September.
