The Waiting Room

Roger Goldby’s amiable first feature, a study of love lost and found in autumnal Balham, offers mild, easy pleasures, even if it stalks emotional truths rather than pierces them. Likeable single mother Anna (Anne-Marie Duff) lives next door to a pair of yuppies, brittle Jem (Zoe Telford) and selfish George (Rupert Graves), who prefers to sneak next door for sex rather than look for a job. Elsewhere, gentle care-home nurse Stephen (Ralf Little) has a decent enough relationship with his clingy girlfriend Fiona (Christine Bottomley), but he evades all talk of babies and can’t get his mind off Anna, the girl he bumped into at the station the other day…

We know Anna and Stephen are meant for each other from the moment their paths cross. They each, separately, have lots of time for the elderly, which is a sure sign of compassion in a film that relies heavily on obvious images of trains to suggest strangers passing in the night. The oldies at Stephen’s care home are further signposts: dying Helen (Phyllida Law) warns Stephen against believing the grass can be greener, while absent-minded Roger (Frank Finlay) might not be as senile as he looks. Fair play to Goldby for bucking a trend for extremes by looking to the city’s middle classes and elderly for drama, but ‘The Waiting Room’ would be a better film if he’d focused harder on fewer characters and leant less heavily on poor music and lingering shots of faces.