Cinema hasn’t always been fair to characters who are on the autistic spectrum. They either get the Rain Man treatment — a collection of tics and quirks topped off with a spectacular gift for numbers, art, astronomy or whatever, amounting more to a plot device rather than a fully rounded character — or they are marked by tragedy — an approach underscored by the assumption that an autism diagnosis is tantamount to a great big thumbprint of doom.
What we rarely get — and what makes the British drama X+Y such an affecting film — is an attempt to put us inside the mind of a person on the autistic spectrum rather than on the outside, looking on.
Asa Butterfield stars as Nathan, a teenage mathematics prodigy who finds a comfort and order in numbers that eludes him in his baffled, buffeted relationships with other people, principally his mother Julie (Sally Hawkins). In this, admittedly, the film ploughs right in with the hoariest of all autism-movie clichés: the oddball savant with the gift for wrangling brain-scrambling equations, but no idea of how a conversation works.
Fortunately, the approach has a freshness and honesty. Director Morgan Matthews focuses on the relationship between Nathan and Julie and their shared experience of different reactions to the bereavement that tore their family apart. There is an almost total breakdown of communication between the two but, interestingly, the film suggests that it’s as much to do with her inability to understand his complex world as it is to do with his failure to process her simple one.
The mediator between the two is Nathan’s irreverent maths tutor, Mr Humphreys (Rafe Spall). A former competitor at the International Mathematics Olympiad, Mr Humphreys has failed to live up to his early promise, but for Nathan he’s a guide into the intimidating world of competitive maths and a subtly anarchic force that disrupts the boy’s strict routines. And for Julie he’s an emotional crutch and an open window into the mind of her son.
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All three are strong. Butterfield’s frown of bewilderment and foundling’s beauty gives him an otherworldly, alien quality that works rather well. And Hawkins’ brittle neediness, the build-up of a lifetime’s unrequited mother love, is achingly painful to watch.
Nathan makes it into the top 16 of the teen maths elite and everything starts to change. He travels to Taipei — a highly cinematic city, evocatively captured as a disorientating whirl of lights and noise — for a maths camp that will determine who gets to compete in the Olympiad. There he meets a female Chinese student to whom he gradually opens up. A special mention should go to Jake Davies, who is brilliant and heartbreaking as the socially maladroit Luke, Nathan’s roommate and fellow autistic.
The one letdown for this generally impressive film is a third-act climax that feels a little too engineered. Nathan has an emotional breakthrough, the camera rests on his hand — finally — touching his mother’s. It’s all a bit neuro-typically uplifting and neat for a film that so successfully explores the unpredictable fireworks in Nathan’s very special mind. Morgan Matthews, 12A, 111min
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