Rare Beasts review – Billie Piper seeks to reinvent the rom-com

“Even though I feel scared and angry, I still love and respect myself,” mumbles Mandy, tapping her temples in rhythm to this reassuring mantra. On the street outside, dozens of women are doing the same, just trying to make it through the working day. Embodying this collective sense of anxiousness, actor-turned-director Billie Piper’s directorial debut, Rare Beasts, arrives as a flawed, chaotic, volatile, quirky, and sometimes surreal character study of the “modern woman.”

We find Mandy (Piper) in the midst of an internal overhaul, dating – though that's a loose label – fellow co-worker Pete (Leo Bill), a narcissistically troubled and violently insecure man, while keeping a watchful eye on her wayward parents (David Thewlis and Kerry Fox) and difficult young son (Toby Woolf). But Mandy craves stability within this personal chaos. She walks the same London streets as Bridget Jones’ Diary and Notting Hill, but finds only a crumb of their romanticism.

On the contrary, Piper’s film outright sells itself as an “anti-rom-com,” manifesting a distinctly British cynicism in its preoccupation with contemporary romance and a sarcastic twang in its comedic flare. Brazenly defiant of the genre's family-friendly tropes, Rare Beasts takes the romantic comedy and lets it snort coke from the coffee table while the kids are sleeping upstairs.

At the centre, Piper’s refined performance offers a charming rebuttal against the film’s otherwise muddled narrative. Scenes shared between Mandy and the uncongenial Pete are like a Jenga game where each is awaiting the other to topple from their ruthless bickering. While Rare Beasts features impressive and stylish set-pieces, though, chronologically they lack a coherent connection. The film often feels as if it would have been better suited to an episodic format, not unlike I Hate Suzie (the show Piper co-created and stars in), especially since Mandy and Suzie are largely cut from the same cloth.

Mandy’s refusal to lose her personhood to motherhood provides what is perhaps the strongest undercurrent in Piper’s debut, yet Rare Beasts attempts to say so much in its allotted 90 minutes that the film gets lost in its theatrical density. That said, some of Rare Beasts’ most powerful moments are the quietly unassuming; stumbling home into a house warmed by amber light, Mandy performs an unromantic strip-tease for Pete. One by one, items of her clothing fall to the floor as she describes her disdain for each body part. When Piper turns her lens to disarmingly intrusive close-ups of Mandy smile, she strikes a wonderful balance of sensitivity and soul-bearing confidence.

Ultimately, Rare Beasts’ script could have used some honing in order to fully commit to its own unconventionality and offer enough expression for its labile characters and Lily James cameo (however brief). Still, arriving at her debut with heaps of stylish ambition, Piper marks herself out as a filmmaker with a unique and contemporary voice, even if Rare Beasts never quite delivers on the rom-com revolution it promises.

Rare Beasts is released in UK cinemas on 21 May.