Beauty Mark

Though its pile-up of poverty, humiliation and bitterness threatens to make it a miserablist moral crusade, the film finds forward momentum in its protagonist, who is not yet ready to be destroyed by what the world has saddled her with.

Every part of this film that goes to an unsettling place or each opposing moment that shows glimmers of hope within disparity hinge on the light shining out of Auden Thornton's extraordinary performance.

The film has a compassion for its subjects and shines a light on the small things that are so often left out of these kinds of stories.

A timely story for the #MeToo era