A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story (Season 1)

A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story (2025) is a British true-crime drama you can watch online on iFILM. Lucy Boynton plays Ruth in a story set against the smoky nightclubs of 1950s London — and the courtroom that decided she should die.

Ruth Ellis runs a drinking club and is hopelessly tied to David Blakely, a charming racing driver who beats and abuses her, then keeps coming back. One night she empties a revolver into him on a public street. The trial that follows barely weighs the years of violence she endured, and the series lingers on everything the jury chose not to see — the people who supplied the gun, the men who walked away clean.

Director Lee Haven Jones films this less as a murder case than as a reckoning with how the law judged a battered woman more harshly than the man who broke her. Toby Jones and Laurie Davidson appear in key roles. Her execution in 1955 became the last time Britain sent a woman to the gallows, and the outcry helped push the country toward ending capital punishment. Stream A Cruel Love online on iFILM.