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Amos Lassen wrote on 07/16/2010:

“The Waiting Room”

A Chance Meeting

Amos Lassen


Anna and Stephen are total strangers who come together by chance by an elderly man who is waiting for his wife at a station platform. The meeting makes them both examine and challenge their own relationships and come to decisions about themselves. "The Waiting Room" has more emotional truths and entertainment value. There is a large cast of South London characters who all are having relationship problems.
We meet George (Rupert Graves) and Anna (Anne-Marie Duff) while they are having great sex only to be interrupted by a kid. We learn that they are not married but they are next-door neighbors. Anna is a single mother now that she and Tony (Adrian Bower) have separated. George is unemployed and married to Jem (Zoe Telford), Anna’s best friend. Then there is Stephen (Ralf Little), a male nurse at a retirement home and who is devoted to a dying patient, Helen (Phyllida Law), He also takes care of Roger (Frank Finlay), an absent-minded old man who ventures out to the train station everyday to meet his wife who never arrives. It is at that very waiting room that Stephen and Anna meet as they listen to Roger’s ramblings but a bit later they each feel they have met their perfect mates.
The entire film rests on Anna and Stephen. So what is so special about the film? Well I would have to say both the script and the ensemble cast.


The movie falls somewhere between all-out romantic comedy and serious relationship drama but without falling into either category, Director Goldby navigates his cast and characters with skill. Each actor gets his or her moments apart from the ensemble.
Graves is excellent as the unctuous George, who's forever trying to bed Anna. But it's the perky Duff ("The Magdalene Sisters," "Garage") who motors the movie as the guilt-ridden but determined single mom.