IN director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan’s film telling a story set among Britain’s snail-like progress toward universal suffrage, police inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) foresees as inevitable what indeed eventually happened at Epsom racecourse on Derby Day, 1913, when Emily Davison achieved martyrdom and focused women’s suffrage objective by walking in front of the King’s horse. 

Steed’s job is to deal with public protests against a status quo arising from Parliament not having given women the vote, a social obscenity if ever there was one. Men who sympathise with women’s plea have been powerless to persuade Parliament.

British history has seen numerous civil disobediences against laws, or lack of laws, subjugating the nation’s poor to the whims of those in power.  “Suffragette” combines recorded history with a credible fictional plot involving three London women who typify the half of the adult population denied a vote simply because of their sex.

In a commercial laundry, men are making the working rules and demanding sexual favours, women are struggling for better lives. Carey Mulligan plays Maud, by age 24 a wife and mother managing the ironing room. Anne-Marie Duff plays suffragist workmate Violet. Helena Bonham-Carter plays Edith, a medico and pharmacist with a social conscience. In a cameo, Meryl Streep delivers a small dose of the bleeding obvious as Emmeline Pankhurst.

Some may feel annoyed by “Suffragette’s” disturbing augmentation of events by using the jumbled visual effects of hand-held cameras to enhance the turbulence of public rioting. “Suffragette” informs and disturbs. Its entertainment values provide good accompaniment to the serious intent of its message.

At Dendy, Palace Electric from Boxing Day