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

The Guardian

10 hours ago

There is never the tiniest doubt that Kerry and Kenny Watson love each other. 'I always tell him that he has the most beautiful ears,' says Kerry, marvelling at the wonder of her husband. 'Even his wrists are beautiful.' But when Kenny came home to Scotland after serving as a sniper in Afghanistan, it looked as if their marriage was almost certainly over. Diagnosed withpost-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Kenny was sleeping between 18 and 24 hours a day, and became so paranoid that he thought dog walkers were Taliban snipers. The worst thing was that the crying of their baby son, Harris, triggered his PTSD. This intimate documentary, told without a scrap of sentimentality, follows the couple over 10 years.
The story unfolds almost like couples therapy, unpeeling the relationship layer by layer. On the voiceover Kenny jokes that when he met Kerry he told her he was a deep-sea firefighter, not a soldier, because he thought the truth would scare her away. What he loved first about his wife was her honesty; but Kerry has never fully opened up to him about a trauma from her childhood. The camera is a fly-on-the-wall in their lives through the worst of Kenny's illness. In the darkest moments, he is agonisingly, unflinchingly direct about what is going on in his head.
While Kenny is becoming more unwell at home, Kerry, who hated school and left with only a few GCSEs, goes back to education. She studies psychology at university and qualifies as a practitioner, while Kenny eventually begins to seek support. A small negative about the film itself is that we don't get any sense of the chronology; it would have been helpful to have captions showing time passing. Love & Trouble perhaps works better on television than the big screen, but you cannot help but admire Kerry and Kenny's emotional courage.
Love & Trouble is in UK cinemas from 27 June.