Nobody Has to Know: Game of Thrones’ matriarch’s stark new Scottish drama

Nobody Has to Know (M, 99mins) Directed by Bouli Lanners, Tim Mileants ***½

The vast vistas and windswept highlands of Scotland are as much a character as the humans in Belgian co-writer, co-director and star Bouli Lanners’ understated, heartrending relationship drama.

The stark, sparse islands of Lewis and Harris make for an evocative, atmospheric backdrop to the slow-burning tension that surrounds the faltering life of Lanners’ Phillipe Haubin.

An essential part of the MacPherson’s farming operation since his arrival from Belgium, his skills at wrangling sheep and knocking in fence posts have been invaluable, even if some of his foreign practices and heathen ways (he claims his only motivation to attend Sunday church would be to look at the women in their hats) don’t always impress family patriarch Angus (Julian Glover). But even he is shocked when “Phil” is suddenly laid low by a stroke.

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When discharged days later from Inverness Hospital, it’s with little memory of his old life, amnesia meaning he doesn’t even recognise Angus’ daughter Millie (Michelle Fairley). “He doesn’t talk as much as he used to either, which is a good thing,” Angus chuckles.

Millie though is determined to bring back the old Phil, reminding him that he has a tattoo of Scotland on his arm, a car that he’s currently not allowed a drive, a stray dog that he’s sort of adopted – and that she and him are lovers.

But as he tries to get his head around all this information – and emotion – Millie also informs him that nobody else knows about their relationship – and she thinks it might be better if it stayed that way.

With its sometimes glacial pacing, Pascal Humbert and Sebastien Willemyns’ mournful piano and strings score and the story’s bleak backdrop, it would have been easy for Nobody Has to Know to slowly slide into predictable melodrama.

However, although there are certainly some obvious tugs at the viewer’s heartstrings, Lanners (2011 Cannes award-winner The Giants) and Stephane Malandrin’s script actually does a terrific early bait and switch, one likely to catch many audience members off-guard and which makes for a much more intriguing tale than might have been.

While Lanners himself is a suitably charming lead, it’s Games of Thrones (she played Stark matriarch Catelyn) and Gangs of London’s Fairley who deserves the lion’s share of the plaudits, as her character wrestles with her own wants and the needs of the man she desperately desires.

Nobody Has to Know opens in select cinemas nationwide on May 19.