‘Dragonfly’ review: Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn headline potent Paul Andrew Williams drama

Dir/scr: Paul Andrew Williams. UK. 2025. 98mins.

In her modest bungalow in an unspecified West Yorkshire industrial city, 80-year-old Elsie (Brenda Blethyn) is dependent upon the cursory thrice-weekly visits from an overstretched house carer. It’s an impersonal and typically relatively slapdash service, however Elsie doesn’t wish to make a fuss. When her 30-something neighbour Colleen (Andrea Riseborough) affords to assist with the procuring, it sparks a friendship between these two ladies who’ve been relegated to the frayed edges of society. This initially subdued, fantastically acted story of an unlikely connection takes a savage and unsettling tonal swerve within the ultimate act. The most recent from Paul Andrew Williams won’t be for everybody, however it’s a chokingly tense commentary on the precarious nature of group.

Packs an unexpectedly devastating punch

Taking part in Karlovy Differ after premiering at Tribeca Movie Pageant, the place its two leads gained the most effective efficiency in a global narrative characteristic award, Dragonfly is a welcome return to the massive display screen for London To Brighton director Williams, who, aside from his cracking, hyper-violent revenge thriller Bull (2021), has been working predominantly in tv over the past decade or so. Lots of his small-screen decisions, such because the BBC TV film Murdered By My Boyfriend and Disney+ restricted collection Suspect: The Capturing Of Jean Charles De Menezes, mirror his fascination with susceptible lives, lived on the sting.

It’s territory he revisits with this potent and unnerving drama: Elsie and Colleen are each the sort of people who find themselves invisible till one thing – or somebody – breaks. Phenomenal performances from each actresses – Riseborough’s work is in an analogous, tightly wound and abrasive register as her Oscar-nominated flip in To Leslie – ought to be a lure for distributors in search of small-scale social commentaries that pack an unexpectedly devastating punch.

Elsie’s horizons have shrunk, frail and unsure since a fall robbed her of autonomy. It’s a problem to navigate between the kitchen and front room, not to mention out of the entrance door. Her connections to the world outdoors are her tv, the dutiful cellphone calls from her son, and the entrance window view of the garden and its well mannered little flower mattress. The tentative physicality of Blethyn’s efficiency – the way in which she has to cling to the kitchen work surfaces as she makes a pot of tea – speaks eloquently of a lady whose house and sanctuary is now a spot mined with challenges and hazards.

The manufacturing design offers an illuminating window into the lives of each the ladies. Colleen’s dwelling house, a mirror picture of Elsie’s however embellished extra spartanly, speaks volumes about this lonely, broken lady. There’s little in her life aside from her canine, an enormous, intimidating-looking bull-breed of some variety named Sabre. In the course of the day, Colleen sits, legs splayed, shoulders slumped, in a single chair positioned in entrance of the home. At evening, she shares her mattress with the canine. An indication above her pillow, which reads ’Love lies right here’, takes on an ache of poignancy as we realise simply how little love there will need to have been in her life.

The love between the 2 ladies appears real, though the rating sounds a sporadic observe of warning, suggesting Colleen’s psychological state shouldn’t be totally dependable. However when issues go flawed, it’s not in the way in which which may initially have been anticipated. Key to the occasions that unfold within the ultimate act is an excruciating go to from Elsie’s son John (a wonderful Jason Watkins, squeezing each final drop of pursed-lipped passive aggression from a short however pivotal cameo position). He doesn’t say as a lot – he doesn’t have to – however John is clearly suspicious of Colleen’s motives. He bridles at her presence in Elsie’s kitchen, silently tallies the variety of biscuits she consumes. However most of all, he takes subject with Sabre – an aversion that may have fateful penalties.