A young man struggles to cope with severe Tourette syndrome in 1980s England in I Swear, opening this weekend in Prague cinemas after winning lead Robert Aramayo a well-deserved BAFTA for Best Leading Actor earlier this year. This heartwarming biopic of Scottish Tourette syndrome advocate John Davidson is blessed with compassionate performances and steady handling from writer-director Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine), who turns a story of alienation into an unlikely crowd-pleaser.
I Swear follows a familiar trajectory for an inspirational real-life story: a difficult childhood, a misunderstood condition, and eventual recognition against the odds. But Jones structures Davidson’s life less as a traditional rise-and-fall arc and more as a series of defining moments: some painful, some absurdly funny, and many quietly devastating.
We first meet young John (played by Scott Ellis Watson in early scenes) in Galashiels in 1983 as a football-loving schoolboy whose early symptoms arrive just as his ambitions begin to take shape. Hopes of a football career are dashed when his uncontrollable tics are misread as misbehavior; similarly, John is punished at school by a principal who takes umbrage at his unintended outbursts. But the most devastating scenes come at home, where even his mother Heather (Shirley Henderson) fails to understand his condition or offer a tender hand.
Thirteen years later, John (Aramayo) has been diagnosed with Tourette syndrome but remains trapped by stigma in a world that does not understand his condition. Medication dulls some of the edges but does not change how the world reacts to him. It is here that I Swear shifts into its most interesting angle: a portrait of a man trying to navigate ordinary life while constantly negotiating how others perceive him.
The film’s emotional and narrative momentum comes from John’s encounters with a small circle of people who begin to understand him on his own terms. Dottie (Maxine Peake), the mother of John’s friend Murray (Francesco Piacentini-Smith), is the first person who shows genuine interest in helping him: not through cure or transformation, but through reframing how he sees himself. She will eventually lend him the compassionate maternal instincts his own mom failed to provide.
Jones does a terrific job at contrasting the two female figures in John’s life while never demonizing his mother. Henderson is excellent in a complicated role as Heather: loving but overwhelmed, often defensive, and unable to fully process what her son is going through—we can feel the childhood trauma as it unfolds through her stoic demeanor. Their relationship becomes one of the film’s most grounded emotional themes, especially in its later reconciliation, which feels earned and grounded in realism, rather than simply cathartic.
As a community center caretaker who refuses to reduce John to his condition, Peter Mullan’s Tommy provides the film’s moral backbone. He articulates one of the film’s central ideas: that Tourette’s is not the core problem—society’s response to it is. In one of the film’s most effective courtroom sequences, Tommy’s testimony reframes John not as someone asking for special treatment, but as someone failed by misunderstanding. It is a simple argument, but the film treats it as transformative.
Aramayo anchors everything with a performance of remarkable control. What could easily have become imitation or spectacle instead becomes something far more nuanced: a sustained portrayal of physical and emotional exhaustion, embarrassment, resilience, and occasional joy. It’s a breakout performance that carefully resists turning John into a symbol: he remains human throughout, sometimes frustrating, sometimes funny, often vulnerable, and never reduced to his condition.
Jones allows humor to emerge naturally from situations rather than from the condition itself, finding awkwardness, irony, and unexpected warmth without tipping into cruelty. There are moments where the structure feels a little conventional, and the film occasionally leans on familiar biopic rhythms, but it avoids the sentimental excess that could have easily overtaken the material. The pacing is measured, but it allows the film’s more emotional beats room to land.
I Swear sits comfortably alongside a tradition of British working-class dramas that turn personal struggle into accessible storytelling without diluting their subject matter. Like Billy Elliot or The Full Monty, it is designed to connect with a wide audience, but it succeeds most when it resists easy inspiration and instead leans into its thematic underpinnings.
The film works because it understands that Davidson’s story is not about overcoming Tourette syndrome in a conventional sense. It is about learning to exist in a world that is slow to understand difference, and about the people who choose to meet that difference with patience rather than fear. Jones’s film may not reinvent the biopic, but I Swear offers a sincere, grounded, and deeply humane portrait of a life that refuses to be defined by its condition.
