Kyle, leaves the group before they do so. Archie's parents threaten to sue the school in retaliation and the headmaster allows Archie to stay on condition he read a leaflet from Alcoholics Anonymous. Defeated by the school's closed ranks, Natalie no longer feels comfortable at the school and leaves, realising that she cannot defeat the school, parents and pupils on her own. Sometime later, Archie wins an award at a school prize giving for essay writing. As he is shaking the headmaster's hand, Kyle, in the front row, pulls up the video of Artchie and Natalie, which he never deleted from his phone, and texts it to her, also saying "I'm sorry". She receives and watches it and realises this is the evidence she needed. The film closes with the audience hearing her phone the police to report her rape. Reception According to the marketing body for UK commercial television, Consent was watched by approximately 316,000 viewers at the time of broadcast, which combined with 83,000 VOSDAL viewers and 165,000 saving it for later made it the 34th most-watched Chanel Four program of the week with 8.4% of their national audience. Consent has been described by Anita Singh in The Telegraph as "required viewing" for UK schools, particularly teenagers, and in style and construction has been compared with John Hughes 1980 Brat Pack film, Pretty in Pink. Writing in Stylist magazine, Kayleigh Dray favourably compared the film's portrayal of its themes to such recent documentary pieces as Zara McDermott's 2021 Uncovering Rape Culture, which saw McDermott draw on her own experience of almost being raped. In The Guardian, Barbara Ellen drew connections with the broader Metoo movement and how it intersects with the ethics of consent and peer-pressure. The choice of casting the Archie character as the main protagonist was praised by Sophie McBain in the New Statesman, who suggested that had, for example, the film focussed on Raffy, it would have been far less powerful viewing. The acting out of their WhatsApp messages by the characters was criticised by Singh, which she suggested was "stagey" and detracted from the film's authenticity, as also, she felt the use of actors older than those they were portraying. The online legal journal Lexology also criticised the film as while holding lofty ambitions to play a role in the fight against tox masculinity, it eventually realised itself as a lost opportunity. Matthew Hardcastle