Love & Trouble review – raw study skilfully unpeels the PTSD that threatens to wreck a marriage | Film

THere is the slightest doubt that Kerry and Kenny Watson love each other. “I always tell him that he has the most beautiful ears,” explains Kerry, amazing her husband’s wonder. “Even his wrists are beautiful.” But when Kenny returned to Scotland after being a sniper in Afghanistan, it seemed that their marriage was almost certainly finished. Diagnosed with a traumatic stress disorder (SSPT), Kenny was sleeping between 18 and 24 hours a day and became so paranoid that he thought that dog walkers were Taliban elite shooters. The worst part is that the tears of their baby, Harris, triggered his SSPT. This intimate documentary, told without a scrap of sentimentality, follows the couple over 10 years.

The story takes place almost like couples therapy, disappointing the relational layer by layer. On the voiceover, Kenny joking that when he met Kerry, he told him that he was a firefighter on the high seas, not a soldier because he thought that the truth would make him frighten. What he loved first in his wife is his honesty; But Kerry has never completely opened its doors about a trauma of his childhood. The camera is a fly-on-the-world in their lives through the worst of Kenny’s disease. In the darkest moments, he is a scary leader, flawless on what is happening in his head.

While Kenny becomes more sick at home, Kerry, who hated school and left only a few GCSE, returns to education. She studies psychology at university and qualifies as a practitioner, while Kenny finally begins to ask for support. A little negative on the film itself is that we have no sense of chronology; It would have been useful to have legends showing time. LOVE & DRAILER may work better on television than on the big screen, but you cannot help but admire the emotional courage of Kerry and Kenny.