Vera Drake

Vera Drake (2004) is a British drama directed by Mike Leigh — watch it online on iFILM. Imelda Staunton plays the title role in a performance that took the Golden Lion at Venice, a BAFTA, and an Academy Award nomination.

Vera is a working-class London woman in the 1950s: she cleans houses, checks in on elderly neighbors, brings soup to people who can't manage on their own. She also quietly helps women who have nowhere else to turn — ending pregnancies, asking nothing in return, believing she is doing right. Under British law of the period, it is a serious crime. When the police arrive at her door one evening, her husband (Phil Davis) and her grown children learn two things at once: what Vera has been doing, and that their lives as they knew them are over.

Leigh wrote and directed without a single line of explicit argument — no speeches about rights or morality. The collision of Vera's small, generous world with the machinery of the state does all the work. Staunton makes it almost unbearable to watch. Stream Vera Drake (2004) online on iFILM.