Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a wonderfully charming and surprisingly sweet movie about an older woman who hires a sex worker. Not exactly a plot you’d normally describe as sweet and charming, but there you have it. I really enjoyed this intimate, charming, and sexy little film.

Practically a play on film, it’s set largely in just one hotel room between two actors at different stages of their career. Emma Thompson plays a reserved and repressed teacher who never had good sex in her entire life. Daryl McCormack plays the male escort hired to deliver whatever fantasies his clients ask for. And Thompson largely just wants decent sex to start and later there’s an itemized list… but mainly there’s a lot of conversation.

Dialog is this film’s bread and butter. Conversation that trends from intimate and forthright, silly and awkward, repressed and open. Talk about mothers and children, husbands and wives, sex and intimacy. I was engrossed and charmed throughout, finding each of their meetings growing and scaling the intimacy and the awkward good natured humor.

The film is advertised as a comedy and surely it has some charming and amusingly awkward laughs. But it’s also pleasantly – if perhaps artificially – romantic and forthrightly dramatic at different stages. It’s a real actor’s film and the two leads are selling it.

Emma Thompson’s performance is daring and honest and not just due to her frank look at sexuality, but more her honest addressing what it means to be a woman of a certain age. Daryl McCormack, who I’m unfamiliar with, also puts on a good performance… a performance that is, itself, based on performance and fantasy but develops honest cracks where we can see past his pretty face to the actual person underneath.

I think this is a pretty great film. Maybe not for everyone and certainly not something you would want to watch with your parents… though perhaps something they’d want to watch themselves. A great set of performances from two fine actors in a single location… if that sounds interesting to you, check it out (it’s premiering on Hulu).

Score: 90