Hopkins built on the real-world casting techniques he had employed in his earlier short films, concentrating on ordinary people whose experiences were similar to those of his written characters, and whom he also found photographically compelling.

[5] Many favourable critics responded to what they found to be the film's visual beauty, and an innovative cinematic reworking of the British Social Realist form.

Variety compared the film in different ways to works by American photographer Nan Goldin (particularly her The Ballad of Sexual Dependency), and the British directors Lynne Ramsay and Alan Clarke.

[6] Other critics drew visual and thematic connections to Romanticism, noting imagery "reminiscent of Gainsborough or Constable – to grandiloquent, tempestuous shots evoking Caspar David Friedrich, and the bold style of other late Romantics".

[8] With Better Things Hopkins was positioned as part of a 'British New Wave' of directors, alongside Steve McQueen and others, demonstrating that there was a 'new generation of British cinema coming to the boil'.