In the charming, Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, sexual awakening is available by the hour
Emma Thompson shines as a repressed widow who hires a male escort to give her an orgasm

From the moment we meet Nancy Stokes, anxiously pacing around a tastefully anonymous hotel room, knocking back a minibar vodka and posing in the mirror to no great personal satisfaction, we can tell she’s a nervous wreck. And why shouldn’t she be? Nancy is a 55-year-old widow awaiting the arrival of a sex worker who’ll hopefully give her the first orgasm of her entire life. The male escort assigned to this monumental task is the “aesthetically perfect” young Leo (Daryl McCormack) and, as he’ll learn over the course of their four meetings, giving Nancy a chance to premiere her O-face means breaking down her well-established defenses.
If that sounds like the premise for a comedy or even a tragedy, it’s actually neither. Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is a tender and richly satisfying charmer whose themes of self-acceptance and body positivity are delivered with a light and carefully crafted touch. Emma Thompson is at her prickly, vulnerable, fiercely intelligent best as Nancy, a stand-in for every woman who’s suppressed her sexuality out of shame, feelings of inadequacy or a need to please others. Unfolding almost entirely in one room, the film is a two-character study of sexual awakening and a heartfelt, yearning dispatch from the farthest corner of the age divide. It’s a sexually frank and intimate story told in a pleasingly mainstream manner that avoids greeting card clichés and empty “girl power” posturing.
One of the surprises of Australian director Sophie Hyde’s first film since 2019’s hard-partying Animals is that as much as we want Nancy to experience the pleasure she’s long been denied, she’s not asking us to love her, just to root for her. This is a woman who faked every orgasm during her 31-year marriage to her recently deceased husband, so who can blame her for being snippy, churlish and terrified? When Leo first glides into the hotel room, gorgeous and poised with a soothing Irish accent and piercing eyes, Nancy’s knee-jerk reaction is to sabotage the encounter. She peppers him with questions about being an escort. “Do you enjoy it?” “Do you feel demeaned?” “Have you been doing this long?” Leo has faced this line of interrogation before, when the unstoppable force of his charm meets the immovable object of a client’s anxiety. Ever the smooth operator, he effortlessly deflects Nancy’s queries with eminently sensible replies like, “You haven’t bought me, you’ve bought my services.”
Such is the dynamic in the early goings of Katy Brand’s probing, often tart, script. Nancy is a real person and Leo is a fantasy and as long as everyone acts accordingly, things should be fine. But Nancy is too anxiety-ridden to just sink into the moment, so the retired schoolteacher finds more intellectual ways to connect with Leo, starting with his use of $10 words like “reductive” and “empirically.” Soon her well-honed talent for self-deprecation and her fear of disappointment soften and the games begin.