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Spoiler warning: this review reveals the secret of Vera Drake, if you prefer not to know what happens in the film, skip to the last paragraph.

Vera Drake is a first and foremost a Mike Leigh film. The British director, who likes to work intensely with his actors to create their characters and the story, has once again created a world populated with seemingly real people. As the Italian title (Il segreto di Vera Drake) indicates, our titular heroine has a secret. Leigh and Imelda Staunton, who plays Drake, were the only two who knew what that secret was; she illegally performed abortions for poor girls in her London neighbourhood in the 1950s. All the other actors, who play her family and acquaintances, did not find out until their characters find out. Call it an extreme form of method-acting; in the hands of Mike Leigh it does wonders.

Vera is a loving wife to Stan (Phil Davis) and a caring mother to Sid (Daniel Mays) and Ethel (Alex Kelly). She is a cleaning lady by day in the houses of the rich, and in between work and home she also finds time to tend to some neighbours. At home she cooks, cleans and makes tea as well of course and no-one could think of anything bad to say about hard-working and caring Vera; she seems to be one of the exemplary silent buoys on which society has floated for millennia.

Vera’s big secret does not seem to concern her much. She keeps it a secret from her family because she knows it is illegal, but at the same time she is very much aware that poor girls do not have any other options if they do not want another outh to feed that they cannot pay for. Vera does her job for the women like she makes a cup of tea for a lonely neighbour; she is the caring mother figure who helps them with their daily troubles.“Tea or grated soap injection makes no difference” she seems to think at least until the police arrive on her doorstep. Vera confesses her crimes, like we would expect from the honest woman we have come to know and she is taken to the police station. Her family, still in the dark, remains behind, flabbergasted.

As the title indicates, Vera Drake is a character study focused on this conspicuously loving, caring and hard-working woman, who is also, at least technically, a criminal. Leigh does not seem to make any judgements beyond making us care for and sympathise with Vera. She herself does not seem to find it incoherent that these two apparent opposites are both present in her character. This is the true force of Vera Drake; the film presents the criminal as a thoroughly human character who thought she was only helping others with her illegal actions. Was she just naive or was she a woman who wanted to give the poor girls something that only the rich could procure safely in a hospital despite the illegal status of abortion? In an awkwardly inserted sequence we follow the rich daughter of one of Vera's employers go through such a procedure. While it makes it clear that the rich had unfair advantages also on this terrain, the sequence feels too much like a separate add-on because not even Vera is involved in this case.

Despite an occasionally hampering pace and a sometimes too meandering sense of storytelling, Vera Drake is worth our attention because of its impeccably conceived and acted characters and the arresting moral quagmire they present us with. Imelda Staunton and her co-stars deliver top-notch work here using the Leigh method of acting. At the end of the ride, we are still not sure whether to actually like or dislike Vera, and this exposes her to be a vulnerable human being just like the rest of us.