The digital production and exhibition processes behind One Life Stand are fascinating enough to fuel real debate on film's future, but they should in no way obscure the outstanding merit of the movie itself and the critical status it deserves right now.
Old-school virtues of scripting and performance are at the heart of this realistically framed narrative portrait of a fraught mother-son relationship, and of a mature woman determined to hang on to a sense of self-worth that seems under fire from all angles.
This subtly directed drama denies itself the cold comforts of miserabilism. Rather, the battered spirit so brilliantly embodied by Maureen Carr battles on: coming to terms with her uncommunicative son's slide into the gigolo trade, and the heartaches she intuits down the premium-rate tarot-reading phone line she works on. The images are austerely precise; the story has soul.