It's incredibly hard to give a movie about such an important subject a negative review (which I don't intend to) or say anything negative about it (which I don't really intend to).

That's because it's impossible to make a movie about or depicting sexual assault and it not be incredibly politicised, and because the topic is not only so socially urgent in any age but particularly topical in the MeToo era, pointing out any negatives feels incredibly tasteless and nitpicky.

The first thing is that the story depicts a sexual assault victim being dragged into an alley by a stranger at knifepoint, which any counsellor will tell you only accounts for a tiny minority of rapes, most of which are committed by someone known to the victim.

If you wanted to be pedantic or uncharitable you could say writer/director Jessica M. Thompson is clueless about the tropes we all assume about rape and how false they are, but by nature of the story it's about the emotional aftermath of the victim and the senselessness of the crime, not justice against the attacker (who's never seen or heard again) or the trauma many women go through of their attacker being still in their life or in close proximity to them.

Because the trauma and the aftereffects Bonnie (Stephanie Beatriz) goes through are genuine and realistic, from trying to laugh it off and tell everyone it was a mugging to the distress and upheaval growing in her mind and life until it threatens to overwhelm her, not wanting to give in to admitting what some scumbag in an alley did to her or have to lump herself with the victims she sees in the course of the struggle that follows.

Because despite getting all those notes right and with the script containing a lot of knowledge about what rape survivors go through, there's something slightly workaday and slightly banal about the proceedings, either in the performances (which I doubt - you can't see any joins or overtrying) or just the mise en scène.

After going to a bar with colleagues and drinking too much in the trendy Brooklyn neighbourhood, Bonnie endures the unthinkable. She has the presence of mind to wipe him out of herself and collect it on a tissue along with her underwear in a plastic bag in case there's any chance of identifying him.

Her loving boyfriend Matt (Michael Stahl-David) comes home to find her in a state and when she tells him what happened he insists on taking her to hospital to get her bleeding head seen to.

The pair try to get on with their lives, but Bonnie's new status causes no end of problems. She wants to know why Matt is so attentive and caring towards her whereas he was so focused on his job before. She doesn't want to feel like a bird with a broken wing, she wants to get back to work, but when the emotional damage bubbles up and she can't focus, she's pulled from the major project, making it all feel worse.

Her coworkers insist on walking her home, feeling protective but only serving to frustrate her because of how suddenly worthy of protection she feels. When she and Matt finally feel secure enough to make love, they hardly dare voice the fear that the rape is all they could think about.

In the midst of it all she visits a lawyer who promises possible good news when another perp is picked up in the neighbourhood, but brings her crashing back to the realities of the legal system – the judge likely to hear her case is notoriously lenient on rape cases, and her being drunk will only give the defence more fuel to take her apart.

There's no real grand resolution apart from Bonnie preparing to tell her far-too-judgemental mother what's really happened and deciding to give the support group she never felt like she belonged in a go, and that's the point. Bonnie will have no choice but to continue to heal, and deciding to admit the burden she's carrying is the first step towards putting it down and getting on with her life.

A lot of the reviews I read praised the performances, but I actually found them just north of mediocre. The real power is in the ideas the script conveys about victimhood, rape culture, the notion of care and how victims heal (or don't).