Tender Loving Care Trailer: Mike Leigh’s Final Feature Arrives This December

As moving a final film as one can hope for, Mike Leigh caps off an astounding career with Tender Loving Care after the director, faced with the muscular condition myositis, announced it is likely his last work. Led by Marion Bailey, Kate O’Flynn, Alice Bailey Johnson, and Paul Jesson, the compassionate, often hilarious family drama will now come to theaters soon following its fall festival run. Ahead of a December 11 release in NY and LA followed by a Christmas Day expansion, the first trailer has arrived.

Here’s the New York Film Festival synopsis: “One of our most steadfast, unflinching chroniclers of the human condition, Mike Leigh has now crafted, along with a customarily brilliant ensemble, a portrayal of overwhelmed, resilient lives in post-Brexit England that should be received as one of his signature works. At its center is Amy (Kate O’Flynn), a government child protection worker who, after a failed relationship, has moved back in with her chipper best friend, Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), whose job as a social services officer is a daily confrontation with anger and resentment. Meanwhile, Amy’s aging parents (Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson), concerned with their daughter’s happiness, suddenly have to contend with a crisis of their own. Smiling through their struggles—with or without a trusty bottle of wine—these finely drawn characters, and all of the remarkable supporting characters with whom they come into contact, speak volumes about the U.K.’s underfunded and fragmented care sector. Avoiding didacticism and maintaining a leveling sense of humor, Leigh shows, with clear-eyed compassion, the difficulty of asking for—and accepting—help in a world that continually lets us down.”

Ethan Vestby said in his review, “All the actors are expectedly terrific—O’Flynn and Johnson’s friendship plays instantly believable—and each individual performer develops the characters’ differences rather subtly. Where O’Flynn takes things on the chin, Johnson is eruptive.”

See the trailer below along with a career-spanning talk from NYFF.