Una review — the abused confronts her abuser dragging very best from Mendo and Mara

REVIEW: Una might pose an arduous trip, but you’ll be silenced and stunned by where Ben Mendelsohn and Rooney Mara will take you.

UNA (M)

Rating: Four stars (4 out of 5) **1/2**

Director: Benedict Andrews (feature debut)

Starring: Ben Mendelsohn, Rooney Mara, Ruby Stokes, Riz Ahmed, Tara Fitzgerald.

The truth hurts, but the lie haunts

SORRY, but there’s no feel-good night at the pictures awaiting you with Una, a riveting adaptation of the stage play Blackbird by David Harrower.

However, if you are up to taking this arduous trip across jagged emotional terrain, you will be silenced, stunned and seriously affected by where it intends to take you.

Rooney Mara stars as Una, a woman in her twenties on a mission to confront Ben Mendelsohn’s Ray, the former family friend who sexually molested her at the age of 13.

Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn are magnetic in the tough-going Una. Picture: Supplied

As the film begins, Una has discovered the whereabouts of Ray in a nearby suburb, where he has carved out a new life for himself after serving jail time.

Ray is now the staff manager of an industrial warehouse — where he is known as Peter — and it is here, in the conference rooms, corridors and cafeteria, that Una conducts a rolling series of devastating cross-examinations of her abuser.

Each successive confrontation between the pair triggers a reluctant return to a time and place that not only ruined Una’s chances of a normal life, but also still defines her as a person.

Through carefully placed flashbacks (in which the younger incarnation of the title role is very evocatively played by impressive newcomer Ruby Stokes) the truth of what occurred between Una and Ray is skilfully pieced together.

Ruby Stokes (as the young Una) and Ben Mendelsohn in Una. Picture: Supplied

If anything, the movie is a jigsaw being assembled meticulously before us from fragments of two lives that were all but ended many years ago.

Both actors astonish with the consistent high calibre and ever-shifting intensity of their performances here.

Ben Mendelsohn is close to career best form in Una. Picture: Supplied

Mendelsohn zeros in on the stark contradiction that is Ray, a man who has found a way to live with his actions, but is yet to find a way to explain them.

If this is not a career best for this extraordinarily consistent and creative Australian actor, then it must go mighty close.

Meanwhile, in Mara’s Una we meet a woman for whom the consequences of those actions pass through her body and mind every waking hour of the day.

Uncompromising, unforgettable stuff.