REVIEW: Ordinary Angels will leave you in awe of the NHS

The extraordinary, nerve-shredding film Ordinary Angels will leave you feeling completely wrung out – and thanking absolutely everything you can think of for the fact that we live in a country intelligent and civilised enough to have dreamt up the NHS. It will leave you pondering just how precious and remarkable our National Health Service is and why its protection simply has to be central to this year’s general election.

Ordinary Angels is the US tale of a family in extremis. The death of the mother leaves the dad with debts of $400,000 dollars for her hospital care– which in turn makes it extremely difficult for him to fund the care his younger daughter needs, a daughter who is clearly going to need a liver transplant some time very soon.

Step in Sharon Steves (Hilary Swank), the ordinary angel of the title, who manages to get the hospital bosses to write off the debt.

But then things get worse. When widower Ed Schmitt (Alan Ritchson) is told that Michelle needs a transplant urgently and has been moved up to number one on the transplant list, he immediately finds himself in a situation thank goodness unimaginable in the UK.

He is told by the doctors that should a liver become available, he will have just hours to get his daughter to a specialist hospital hundreds of miles away. His only option, he is told, despite his clearly modest means, is to make sure that he has got a private plane on standby. Never will you have been so pleased to be here in this country, nor so shocked at a real-life situation playing out the other side of the Atlantic.

And then the film really turns the screws for a nail-biting final half hour. A liver transplant becomes available – but on the day of the worst blizzard in living memory. Director Jon Gunn’s film is movie-making at its edge-of-the-seat best. I am not sure I can remember a tenser watch than this one – grippingly, horribly tense no matter how much you think you know what the outcome is going to be. Surely the little girl isn’t going to die… Surely not…

Ritchson is terrific as the gruff, uncommunicative widower who is terrified that he’s going to lose his daughter too. He’s virtually incapable of verbalising any of it. Emily Mitchell gives a hugely poignant performance as Michelle, his younger daughter slipping away by the minute. Deeply impressive too is Skywalker Hughes as the older daughter Ashley, again a performance which tugs at every heartstring.

But it’s Hilary Swank’s film as the wayward Sharon, an alcoholic in denial who reluctantly goes along to an addicts’ meeting and hears someone say that the best approach is to find meaning and purpose outside yourself.

When she sees in the papers a story about the little girls’ mum’s death, she gate-crashes the funeral. She’s found her cause and she’s not taking no for an answer, however ungracious and unwelcoming dad Ed turns out to be. She appoints herself the family’s fund-raiser and ends up galvanising an entire community.

It's stirring stuff, the tautest, tensest exploration of the impulse to do good. It’s manipulative. Of course it is. But it’s also human, powerful, inspiring and utterly riveting.