Prima Facie
Sometimes Forgets It's a Film At All
Writer: Anya Duncan
I'm unsure how to react to Prima Facie.
It is an important film, carrying a message that deserves to be heard, and there is something genuinely compelling about watching a woman lose faith in the very system she has spent her life defending. And yet, for all its relevance and emotional potential, I found myself frustrated by the way it ultimately chooses to tell its story.
I left recognising the importance of what it had to say, but wishing it had trusted its audience a little more.
At the centre of the film is Tessa, a brilliant barrister who has built her career defending men accused of sexual assault. She understands the law, its procedures and its expectations. She knows how to dismantle a testimony, how to expose inconsistencies, how to remind a jury that a compelling story is not necessarily a truthful one. For years, she has worked within a system that demands evidence over instinct and certainty over feeling. Then she is raped herself, and the distance between the law as she understands it and the justice she needs becomes painfully clear.
Cynthia Erivo is a compelling Tessa. Similarly to the one-woman play written by Suzie Miller which inspired this film, on-screen Tessa knows how imperfect victims can appear in court because she has made a career out of exposing those imperfections. When she finds herself in that position, the contradiction is devastating. She cannot simply become the ideal victim she might once have expected a jury to believe. She is still herself: intelligent, contradictory, human.
I also thought the film handled the rape scene itself with considerable care. It does not retreat from the details that will later become significant in Tessa's testimony, nor does it flatten the encounter into a clear-cut sequence of events designed to make the audience's response easy. Instead, it allows the circumstances to remain uncomfortable and complicated in precisely the ways that will matter when the case reaches court.
Unfortunately, for me, this is where my success with the film ends.
The final twenty minutes felt clumsy to me. After spending so much time exploring the limitations of the legal system through Tessa's personal experience, the film begins to explain its own argument with a directness that I found less effective than the drama that preceded it.
Erivo's speech to the judge is the clearest example. The sentiments are important, and I understand why the scene exists. Tessa has reached a point where her personal experience and professional understanding have collided, and she has every reason to speak with anger and conviction. But the writing becomes so heavy handed that the scene begins to feel less like a character reaching the end of her journey and more like a film delivering its concluding statement.
At one point, Tessa looks directly into the camera. For me, that moment crystallises the problem. Rather than allowing the audience to draw its own conclusions from what we have witnessed, the film seems to turn towards us and explain what we should take away from it. The intimacy of the drama gives way to something closer to a lecture.
I felt similarly about the conversation between Tessa and a journalist shortly before the credits, in which they discuss the statistic that one in three women are victims of sexual assault. Again, the information is relevant, and the scale of the problem should not be minimised. But the scene felt too explicit in its intention. After watching Tessa endure the personal and professional consequences of sexual violence, I did not need the film to underline its wider significance quite so emphatically.
The first act, too, makes some strange directorial choices. It is always going to be a challenge to turn a one-woman play into a feature length film with a wide cast, but the first 20 minutes of the film fell flat, producing mediocre scenes that showcase Tessa’s life before the assault.
I do not want my frustrations with Prima Facie to obscure what it gets right. Its premise is powerful, its subject matter is urgently relevant, and its portrayal of an imperfect victim confronting a system she once trusted is compelling. The film understands that sexual violence does not end with the assault itself; there is the aftermath, the retelling, the scrutiny and the exhausting demand to make a deeply personal experience fit within the structures of public judgement.
What troubled me was not the strength of its message, but the moments when the film seemed unwilling to let that message exist without explanation. By the final twenty minutes, I felt the drama giving way to advocacy so explicit that it began to undermine the emotional complexity that had made Tessa's story so affecting in the first place.
I wanted the film to trust us with the contradictions it had introduced. I wanted it to let the silence after a difficult scene do some of the work.
I think Prima Facie is an important film. I just wish it had trusted the power of its own story enough to say a little less.
