I Swear

Kirk Jones's I Swear arrived in 2025 and won Robert Aramayo the BAFTA for Best Actor in a Leading Role, a result widely greeted as overdue recognition for a performance built almost entirely on physical mastery. The film received five BAFTA nominations and a second win, in a year when British cinema had a strong showing across the categories.

The film tells the true story of John Davidson, a Scottish boy in Galashiels diagnosed with severe Tourette syndrome in the early 1980s, before the condition was widely understood in British medicine. Davidson grew from a teenager misread as a delinquent into one of the UK's most prominent advocates for Tourette awareness; the BBC followed him in two well-known documentaries (John's Not Mad in 1989 and The Boy Can't Help It in 2002). Aramayo plays Davidson across approximately a decade of his life. Maxine Peake as his mother, Shirley Henderson, and Peter Mullan in supporting roles complete a quietly excellent ensemble.

The film resists every standard biopic temptation: there is no triumphant climactic speech, no romantic-interest subplot, no medical-revelation moment. Instead, Jones and screenwriter John Ainslie focus on the granular work of a family raising a son the medical establishment has nothing to offer, and on the small acts of attention that begin to change a community's understanding of him.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The finest British biographical drama of recent years, and one of the few films about disability that genuinely understands disability is mostly other people's problem. Aramayo's performance is one for the long memory.