Andrea Riseborough proves, yet again, to be one of Britain’s best and most chameleonic actors in Paul Andrew Williams’s Dragonfly, an eerie and deeply upsetting slice of psychologically distressed social realism. Playing a lonely woman in one of the UK’s many sad slices of suburban nowhere who becomes both a carer for and emotional dependant of her elderly neighbour, it’s another brilliantly unnerving performance from her, anchoring a story that starts painfully grounded and keeping it compelling as it starts to go off the rails a bit towards the end.
This lonely woman is Colleen, living a comfortable-ish but lonely life in a council house with no one for company except her gigantic (and probably illegal) bully dog Sabre. Her only neighbour is Elsie (Brenda Blethyn), a widow in her 80s whose awful son John (Jason Watkins) barely visits and compensates by hiring poor-quality private care visits a few times a week, all of whom put in minimal effort and treat Elsie like a child. Seeing this injustice, Colleen offers her (unpaid) services as cook, cleaner, shopper, and general companion, to which Elsie quickly agrees, charmed by Colleen’s brusque straightforwardness and genuine skill at being a carer, able to cater to Elsie’s physical disabilities while still talking to her like an equal adult.
This early relationship building, including Elsie getting over her fear of Sabre, has some incredibly sweet moments, all played perfectly by Riseborough and Blethyn, who is really excellent in the best role she’s been afforded in at least 15 years. Yet, Williams keeps the darkness simmering at the surface; there’s a hard to articulate but unmistakeable tension and danger to Colleen even when she’s being nice, and a bouncy yet ominous score ensures that we always know that this is going to go downhill.
As the pair’s lives get more intertwined, to the chagrin of the guilty-feeling John (Williams writes his sniveling lash-outs and projections really brilliantly, one of this year’s most effectively hateful characters), this descent begins slowly at first, before it snowballs into outright craziness in the last 20-ish minutes. I have to say that I didn’t quite buy these more operatic plot moves after the staunch Broken Britain realism found in the first three quarters of the film, but Riseborough and Blethyn do still keep it emotionally punishing with their exceptional duo of lead performances.
Dragonfly is not an easy film to recommend – if one phrase were to most succinctly describe it, it would be ‘crushingly sad’. Yet, in taking an overfamiliar piece of social realism and distorting it through the psychological nightmares of long-term loneliness and physical frailty and vulnerability, Williams has made something impossible to ignore. Haunting and subtly stylish, it’s an anguished cry from an ailing nation, one in which community might be able to slow the spirals into despair, but is no longer enough to put a stop to them completely.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 