So this is Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical retelling of a shitty relationship she had in her twenties.

The protagonist, Julie, is a twenty-year-old child of privilege; she wants to become a filmmaker, and make films about working class British neighborhoods, because (she says) she wants to get out of her bubble. So when she meets this older guy and kinda kicks off a relationship with him (really, more just passively going along as he manipulates the relationship into existence), you get the sense there’s some of that same escape-from-the-bubble desire at work.

It eventually becomes apparent — more quickly to the viewer than to naive Julie — that the dude is a heroin addict. Even once she puts it together, though, she doesn’t break it off with him, not even after he does some frankly unforgivable things. And then when she finally does break it off, it doesn’t stick, and before long, they’re together again.

The movie is basically a ticket on the Bad Judgment Express, and it can be kind of frustrating that way, but… it’s believably frustrating. She’s a very unworldly 20-year-old, and this relationship is making her feel important and adult and like she’s part of something that matters. That he’s a manipulative shit is obvious enough to the 60-year-old Hogg as she makes the movie, and obvious enough to us as viewers; but not so much to the young protagonist.

To its credit, the movie doesn’t lean too hard on horrible foreshadowing — this isn’t one of those movies where you just spend 40 minutes waiting for the other shoe to drop; shoes drop in quick succession, and the horrible things that the viewer dreads happen before too much time has been spent in the dreading.

ALSO: Speaking of being old, the actress playing Julie is Honor Swinton Byrne, and she looks kinda like Tilda Swinton, and I was wondering if she’s her sister. And then Tilda herself shows up, playing the character’s mother, and oh hey, I guess everyone is older than I think they are, as she is Tilda’s real-life daughter. Welp.

ALSO ALSO: Hogg is apparently making a Part II to this, which I’m sort of curious about, because the main driver of the plot here is, uh, no longer going to be relevant for a second movie. So I guess it’ll just be a sequel that follows Julie through another episode of her life?