Prima Facie review – Cynthia Erivo’s brilliant barrister blazes in sexual assault drama

Adaptation of the international stage hit stars a commanding Erivo as Tessa, whose career defending rape suspects is undermined by experience

A blazingly fierce, effortlessly commanding central performance from Cynthia Erivo, like something from classical drama, powers this movie adaptation of Suzie Miller’s international stage hit (which starred Sheridan Harbridge in the original Australian production, and then Jodie Comer in London’s West End). Miller has written the screenplay, with Susanna White directing.

In the theatre, it is a bravura solo spectacle, a stream-of-consciousness torrent which puts you right inside the trauma and the terror. The movie opens things out to a more conventionally presented drama and we lose something of that overwhelming moment-by-moment access to the lead character’s inner thoughts. But the resulting story is robustly constructed and tremendously acted.

The title is a legal Latin term meaning “on the face of it”, applied to evidence which appears, perhaps wrongly, to clinch a certain case, and the film leaves it up to us to decide how that is relevant here. Erivo plays Tessa Ensler, a brilliant young barrister who has battled racism and classism to get where she is, relishing her mastery of cross-examination and in love with the theatre and spectacle of the law. But without quite admitting it to herself, she has made her name defending men who need women to defend them for the optics in rape cases, and she is ruthless and cunning in undermining female complainants in the witness box.

When Tessa begins a relationship with Julian Brooks, her smoothie head of chambers (a chillingly entitled and ersatz-charming performance from Daniel Ings), things seem to be going well at first. But then after dinner one night an awful event causes Tessa to doubt everything about her professional career. The intimately horrible experience of deciding to report a rape and then doing so is adroitly captured here; as Tessa talks to the two police officers, the camera lingers on a coffee-mug shaped stain on the chipboard wooden desk, the sort of hallucinatory, banal detail that someone in shock might dwell on.

The film shows us how years go past in her life in the same daze of determination, in which she is still required to earn a living. But the courtroom scene itself, however realistic and without illusion it is, does not quite match the final speech from the play; however, Erivo’s performance has moral authority to the last and Noma Dumezweni is poignantly dignified as her mother.