I research Tourette’s – I Swear is an unflinching yet empathetic portrait of life with this condition

I Swear is a biographical drama based on Scottish campaigner John Davidson’s experience of Tourette’s syndrome.

Spanning his teenage years to the present, it follows the first tics and their social fallout. It traces how Tourette’s syndrome – and the relationships and institutions around it – shape a life over decades.

Swearing forms part of Davidson’s experience — the film opens with an expletive-laden outburst at his MBE ceremony. But I Swear is careful to stress that coprolalia (involuntary swearing) affects only a small minority of people with Tourette’s. In doing so, it moves decisively beyond the sensationalising of symptoms that so often dominates media representation.

Davidson’s (Robert Aramayo) story begins in Galashiels, Scotland, in 1983, when he entered “big school”. At first, his tics are dismissed by teachers and classmates as little more than irritating, attention-seeking gestures. But gradually they become impossible to ignore – uncontrollable motor and vocal outbursts.

This shift strains Davidson’s relationship with his father (Steven Cree), who had pinned hopes on his son’s promise as a footballer. The dream of a professional career collapses, replaced by frustration and disappointment. The consequences ripple outward to physical punishment at school and mounting conflict at home.

Thirteen years on, the story pivots towards transformation. After a long season of withdrawal – and the conviction that Tourette’s disqualified him from work and ordinary sociability – Davidson begins, tentatively, to reenter public life. The turn is scaffolded by allies. Dottie Achenbach (Maxine Peake), a forthright mental health nurse, and Tommy Trotter (Peter Mullan), the local hall caretaker, help him to forge kinship beyond his family.

More importantly, they establish that Davidson’s Tourette’s is not a moral fault requiring his apology. Recognising this recalibrates his trajectory, shifting him from enforced quiet to self-acceptance and, in time, advocacy.

Complicated people, complicated stories

I Swear frames Davidson’s experience through what sociologists call biographical disruption. That means the sudden onset of Tourette’s unsettled not only his sense of self but also the imagined trajectory of his life.

The film resists a simple, linear trajectory towards redemption and refuses to resolve into a straightforward tale of triumph. Instead, it foregrounds Davidson’s ongoing struggles, rooted not only in the tics themselves, which are painful, agonising and exhausting — but also in the ignorance and stigma that surround the condition.

This dual dimension of disability is captured well. Davidson’s tics cause him distress but the social response compounds and magnifies his suffering. Aramayo’s performance conveys the physicality of the tics with remarkable authenticity. Yet the greater harm often lies in his community’s refusal to recognise them as anything other than signs of deviance or madness.

Casting an actor who doesn’t have Tourette’s in the lead is a controversial decision, however. It reopens the debate over disability drag – a choice some critics argue sidelines disabled performers and reduces lived experience to surface technique.

In a few other ways, too, the film succumbs to familiar disability cinema tropes. The late reconciliation with Davidson’s mother, for example, though true to life, is framed with a Hollywood gloss that smooths conflict into catharsis.

Where the film feels most refreshing is in its refusal to cast Davidson as a saintly sufferer whose purpose is to inspire pity. Instead, he emerges as a three-dimensional character, capable of humour and resilience, but also of error and misjudgement. Davidson’s direct involvement (he is credited as an executive producer) anchors the film’s authenticity.

The tone also resists the solemn earnestness typical of disability dramas. It gives audiences permission to laugh with Davidson, not at him. Humour is more than comic relief – and it is never weaponised against the Tourette’s community. It functions as a means of deepening empathy, helping us to understand Davidson more fully and avoid unnecessary sensationalisation.

This refusal of solemnity sets the film apart from many disability dramas, allowing moments of levity to sit alongside the gravity of stigma and struggle. Alongside Davidson resilience, the film underscores the need for the infrastructures that make it durable: peer networks and affinity spaces where Tourette’s is unexceptional, and allies whose informed practice actively disrupts stigma.

Ultimately, I Swear is less about miraculous transformation than about the everyday struggle of a person to survive in a society that demands conformity. It is this honesty, rather than sentimentality, that makes the film worthwhile.

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