Cake 2015 ***

Since Friends made her a household-name, Jennifer Aniston deserves credit for alternating mainstream comedies (We’re The Millers, Horrible Bosses) with more ruminative indie dramas (The Good Girl). Daniel Barnz’s Cake finds her in top form as Claire, a woman suffering from chronic pain, and with a support group she resists with a Fight Club defiance.  Claire will not go quietly, and her constant addiction to medicine and her caustic observation of the world around her are well caught by Patrick Tobin’s screenplay. Whether cheekily attempting to smuggle drugs back from Mexico or scrabbling behind picture frames for hidden bottles of pills, Aniston makes Claire a three-dimension character; waking up in the middle of the night, racked with pain, Claire captures the voice of a large and unrecognised group of sufferers in modern society.