The film stars Midlands Movies Awards nominee Varakunan Panchalingam who takes the call from his mum before struggling out of bed to start his day.

The film is shot partly in Tamil with subtitles which gives the short a nice flavour and always helps to shine a light on the warm diversity of the Midlands region. And later also provides comedy stemming from many word misunderstandings.

As our lead gets dressed, puts his shades and headphones on, he then heads down the street with a spring in his step to an upbeat soundtrack before entering a local coffee shop.

A quick piece of advice would be to simply shorten the intro credits. The last name appears at 1 minute 52 seconds in which is a huge amount of time for a short under 8 minutes. Almost a quarter of the runtime. For comparison, using a similar percentage would see still credits rolling after 30 minutes in a modern mainstream film.

In most cases from the shorts I’ve seen, a title and maybe a “directed by” credit is all that’s needed. My advice for budding filmmakers is to place everything else at the end. This ensures you get the most out of your limited runtime and pull an audience straight into your story.

Back to the story we find the man being asked for his order by a barista, which gets mistranslated, before our lead becomes smitten by a woman (Ambika Sharma) who joins him at his table. Noisily slurping his soup, he then rudely takes a phone-call which leads to an embarrassing skit where we (loudly) only hear half of a cringeworthy conversation.

The differences in language is a unique angle to create a comedy clash and the film is made with a lot of heart about dating blunders but certainly could have been fleshed out a bit more with the two characters. Written by Varakunan Panchalingam and Danyl Rathband, True Love Comes Quietly therefore ends as a nice, if somewhat slight, slice of romance and comedy with a fun premise.

Michael Sales