A blazingly fierce, effortlessly commanding central performance from Cynthia Erivo, like something from classical drama, powers this movie adaptation of Suzie Miller’s international stage hit (which starred Sheridan Harbridge in the original Australian production , and then Jodie Comer in London’s West End ). Miller has written the screenplay, with Susanna White directing .

In the theatre, it is a bravura solo spectacle, a stream-of-consciousness torrent which puts you right inside the trauma and the terror. The movie opens things out to a more conventionally presented drama and we lose something of that overwhelming moment-by-moment access to the lead character’s inner thoughts. But the resulting story is robustly constructed and tremendously acted.

The title is a legal Latin term meaning “on the face of it”, applied to evidence which appears, perhaps wrongly, to clinch a certain case, and the film leaves it up to us to decide how that is relevant here.…