II’ve known about I Swear (Kirk Jones, 2026) movie for a while, partly (but not solely) because of the ridiculous BAFTA controversy, where, ironically (depressingly so), almost everyone involved missed the entire point of the movie they had also chosen to laud with awards. At the same time, I’d also pretty much decided that I’d never watch it. Not because I didn’t believe the consensus, that it was very good, but because I didn’t think I wanted to subject myself to it.

I Swear depicts the true story of a Scottish man with Tourette’s Syndrome, an incurable condition that, in his case, involves involuntary ticks, OCD behaviour, and uncontrollable outbursts of noises and socially unacceptable words and phrases. Now, having been a regular LA Law watcher back in the 80s/90s, I’ve long been familiar with Tourette’s, in general, and this severe form, in particular. As such, I figured that I already had a pretty good idea how the whole thing would play out in I Swear, and that, thanks to my acute second-hand embarrassment, I also figured it would be too excruciatingly unpleasant to watch.

Despite my misgivings, I rented the DVD, thinking maybe I might give it a go. I had second thoughts, however, even as I was putting the disc in my DVD player. As the movie began, as my second-hand embarrassment-senses started to tingle, I told myself that I could always turn it off if it got to be too much. Honestly, I was pretty sure I was going to end up doing this. But then an incredible thing happened (well, incredible to me, given my preconceptions) – the movie somehow managed to side-step all of my fears while also delivery exactly what it needed to deliver.

I Swear still contains a lot of the scenes you’d expect, where the character’s ticks bring him into conflict with almost everyone around him, but these moments are edited and presented in such a way that the situations never seem to be exploiting matters for cheap emotion, i.e., it doesn’t come off like an after-school special/ham-fisted Oscar-bait type deal. Sometimes, this means cutting into the action after the inciting incident, so we’re watching the results, other times it means employing big time jumps, thus skipping over what would probably be some of the more difficult bits. Mostly, it just means staging everything from the main character’s point of view in a totally grounded, largely unsentimental fashion.

It also greatly helps that the movie does something at the opening which I normally can’t stand, in that it gives us a prefatory scene from way further along in the narrative (in this case, the main character receiving a commendation from The Queen), then it goes back and starts from the beginning. The reason this works here is that it allows the audience to know that something positive happens eventually, thus making the difficult-to-watch scenes somewhat more bearable.