Kerry and Kenny Watson are a devoted couple with a young son, but both harbour secrets from their past that could rip their marriage up by the roots. Director Amy Hardie followed the pair over a painful, painstaking seven years that tests the Kerry and Kenny to their limit. Their love for each other is never in doubt, but will that love be enough?

Hardie’s film is a meticulously composed portrait of a marriage under the most extreme pressure. It is revealed that Kenny is suffering intense PTSD from his time as a sniper in Afghanistan, while Kerry endured unspeakable trauma as a child. As Kenny’s mental health deteriorates – increasing paranoia and an inability to emotionally connect with his son – Kerry decides to return to education and study psychology. The aim is to better understand what her husband’s internal ordeal. It also leads her to interrogate her own past.

No punches are pulled during this occasionally shockingly intimate study in pure fortitude and resilience. Kenny is harrowingly candid and self-excoriating in detailing his travails, fully aware of the impact on his family, with that knowledge making it all the worse. Kerry too is brutally honest as the relationship clings on by splintering fingertips.

What makes Love & Trouble work so well is how much it lets us connect to its subjects. Kenny and Kerry are instantly likeable, besotted with each other, and effusive about their love. Even at the lowest ebb – and it becomes a gruelling watch at times, giving the illusion of a film longer than its 90 minutes – there is an endless reservoir of empathy at its core. It also has much to say about the role of therapy, the value of finding those with comparable experiences, and the utter failure of the army to provide any psychological preparation for the young people they enlist. But the focus is always on the central couple, and the long road to recovery.

It’s a testament to Amy Hardie’s integrity as a documentarian that the Watsons trusted her so completely to give themselves over so completely to the process. The subject of any documentary is ultimately at the mercy of the, narrative, directorial, or editorial decisions of the filmmakers, yet there isn’t the faintest hint of exploitation here. Indeed, the couple seem to have found some therapeutic benefit in the camera itself, pouring their souls into Hardie’s neutral, non-interventionist lens.

Ultimately very much a love story, with the narrative driven by its central couple and with little obvious directorial steering from the filmmakers, Love & Trouble is a rigorously observed and compassionate documentary. Beautiful in the way a broken and mended vase is beautiful, it’s a reminder of how ordinary people can find extraordinary strength within themselves, and in each other.

In selected cinemas now