It feels like a play, but it’s not. It makes you laugh, but it isn’t just funny. It’s quiet and empty but speaks about the fullness of life. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is about a young sex worker who calls himself Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) and a 55-year-old retired religious teacher who calls herself Nancy Stokes (Golden Globe winner Emma Thompson). They find themselves in a nondescript hotel room for the purpose of having sex.

This setup might seem familiar. The film deviates from the formula, however, as it delves deep into the characters. We find out that Emma Thompson’s character Nancy has lived a dull, dutiful life. Now, two years after the premature death of her husband, she is looking for a taste of … pleasure. There is a complication, of course: Nancy is rigid, and she knows it. She wants to try various sexual plays out of curiosity. She actually writes them down and wonders if one of the items on the list is still called ‘sixty-nine.’ All this without, of course, expecting to achieve a climax. That is out of her league, she feels.

Leo Grande, the stunning and gentle call boy, thinks differently. Confident about his abilities to give and receive pleasure, he takes it upon himself to loosen the nervous, slightly hysterical, intelligent, and demanding client who, he believes, is capable of being both sensual and attractive; if only she allowed herself free to pursue what makes her blood rush to her cheeks.

What Leo Grande does not know, at first, is that the meetings with Nancy are not going to be revelatory just for her. He, too, will have to face his own, deep-seated insecurities. In the process of delivering and discovering guilt-free pleasure, both will encounter sides of themselves that have been long forbidden.

The unlikely meeting of these two very different characters feels spontaneous and unforced, at once natural and intriguing. In the Q&A after the film’s Sundance premiere, writer Katy Brand discussed the genesis of the screenplay as a more or less spontaneous event.

“Ideas go through my brain quite frequently and quite fast, and I tend to ignore a lot of them, but sometimes one just snags. And if it sits there for a while and keeps rumbling around, then I try and pay it some attention. So, I had quite a strong image of the opening scene, where a woman is pacing in a hotel room, a little nervous and waiting.”

While Brand had not thought of the story beyond a knock on that hotel room door, the story just flowed out of her once she made the decision to bring it to existence: “I just thought, ‘I’m going to sit down and write this and I’m going to get it out of my head. And I’m going to somehow find out what happens out of this opening scene with this knock on the door, what happens after that.”

Most of the action takes place in the hotel room. Mostly on the bed, at that. But the cinematic grace is contained in the fact that only film can endow such scenes with a high level of intimacy. For the director, Sophie Hyde, “the restrained format” served as an attraction. “I’m really drawn to these stories,” she said in the same event before a live, virtual audience. “The idea of two people in a room and the things that you can do inside of that, [is] really appealing to me.” 

Additionally, Hyde liked the fact that the script “didn’t just expand out over [Nancy’s] whole life.” “It was like,” she continued, “what happens in this moment? What can we explore between two people who might never usually meet? And what does that give us the space to do? We go inside and the terrain that we explore is a shifting emotional landscape, really, even though they’re also having sex.”

On a deeper level, the story is about confronting one’s hopes and fears, desires, and insecurities. It demanded actors who were willing to expose their bodies, their faces and their characters’ personalities in all their vulnerability, flaws and reality. There is no attempt to glorify or to hide. On the contrary. Everything seems to happen in broad daylight while aiming toward a state of complete nakedness, both metaphoric and literal.

“There’s no need to tick any kind of box because [Nancy] stepped absolutely out of the moral framework, the emotional framework, the social framework that she normally inhabits,” Thompson explained. “In this room, [there] is only her essential self, slowly peeling pieces of herself away. It’s like watching someone taking off all these roles that they’ve played, questioning them and then, coming out naked emotionally and physically for the first time. It’s a whole new examination of what it is to be intimate with somebody without the romantic necessities.”

The characters’ “trajectory of more healing, more self-awareness” excited Daryl McCormack. “Bit by bit, you realize that there are little doors opening within each one of them. By the time you meet them at the end, they’re drastically different people.”

“The first thing that struck me,” said Emma Thompson, “was [the script’s] utter originality. And then, of course, afterward followed swiftly its necessity: the fact that we don’t talk about pleasure or shame in the ways that perhaps would be useful to us.”  She adds: “[I didn’t] realize quite how thirsty I was for a story like this until I read it.”

In its commitment to the bare truth as experienced by the characters, the film achieves freedom not only from the “baggage of romance,” as Thompson described it, but also from superficial social commentary. The fact that Leo is black and Nancy is white appears to only emphasize the possibility of the absence of such labels, there, in the neutral zone of the hotel room.

“For me,” said McCormack, “the characters were representing something a bit deeper.” “I felt like our endeavor was always to find the souls of these people. Particularly, I think, where they come from as individuals, not necessarily how they are seen in the world and what [their] position is.”

“As soon as we actually look into one another’s eyes and exchange our experiences and our humanity, all [assumptions] just go,” Thompson agreed. “[They go] in an instant because we’re humans. When we are humans together, assumptions mean nothing. They just don’t apply anymore. They melt like snow in August. It’s really interesting to watch [the characters’] assumptions about one another be melted by the warmth and the heat of actual intimacy.”

Is the film about female liberation? Yes, to a degree. About the reversal of gender roles? Yes, especially when considering the characters’ age difference. Does it present social commentary? Yes. Say, in moments when Nancy suggests the creation of a “public service” for sexual pleasure. Racial politics? Well, somewhat. Perhaps.

In the end, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is all and none of the above. It defies audience expectations. You could describe it as a genuinely surprising film that makes you laugh with sympathy. Or you could call it a … meta-comedy.