Paul Andrew Williams's feature debut was London to Brighton (2006), but the British director has never been much interested in capital cities. His latest feature, Dragonfly, is another example of this, a dark, understated drama about how the unnoticed lives of suburbanites can generate surprising headlines. In a straightforward way, it's a sister film to his provocative 2010 home invasion film, Cherry Tree Lane, in which, anticipating Adolescence, the humdrum life of a middle-class couple is turned upside down when they are inexplicably attacked by violent, unruly teenagers for no apparent reason.
In reality, however, and despite the bloodshed both on and off screen, it turns out to be more similar to the film Williams directed in 2012. Titled Song for Marion, it starred Terence Stamp as an emotionally withdrawn widower who joins a choir to pay tribute to his late wife (Vanessa Redgrave).
Director: Paul Andrew Williams
Writer: Paul Andrew Williams
Stars: Andrea Riseborough, Brenda Blethyn, Jason Watkins
It wasn't a commercial success, and Dragonfly perhaps wasn't either, but the new film makes better use of the former's ingredients: themes of loneliness, regret, grief, self-worth, and family. And like Song for Marion, it features a star-studded cast: two Oscar nominees playing characters out of their age range and out of their comfort zones.
There's little to no conceit in the central pairing of Brenda Blethyn, as the elderly widow Elsie, and Andrea Riseborough, as her unemployed neighbor Colleen, and the styles of these two very different actresses work perfectly together. The first ten minutes of the film present the two women's lives with poignant economy: living in terraced bungalows, they lead eerily similar lives, like ghosts. Elsie had a life and now misses it deeply, but Colleen never had one. "That's weird," Colleen says intuitively when she first visits Elsie's house. "It's exactly like mine, only backward."
Colleen has been living next door to Elsie for only a year before the story begins, and it's not immediately clear why she suddenly appears to offer her services: does Elsie want something from the shop? But Colleen has been watching the procession of caregivers who visit Elsie daily, and she sees a woman who deserves more than the clock-watching agency nurses who come to give her unnecessary showers and food that doesn't agree with her at all. There is, as they say, a gap in the market, and Colleen rushes to fill it, something Elsie appreciates and which helps the once-dowdy woman flourish.
Compared even to the slow buildup of Bull (2021), the film inches forward to reveal itself as a genre film, but Raffertie's score stays ahead of the action throughout. Nothing will be truly revealed or explained in the end, but Williams's script presents fascinating ways in which these two very different women—the relatively elegant Elsie and the undoubtedly working-class Colleen—connect. Key to this is the introduction of Elsie's son, John (Jason Watkins). Middle-aged and yet still pathetically on the rise, John is the harbinger, and his despicable bourgeois values, which come between Elsie and Colleen, turn out to be the meat of the sandwich.
Instead of Chekhov's gun, in this scenario we have a dog, and Colleen's inability to control her "mentalist" hybrid, Sabre, doesn't sit well with either of them, leading to a very violent denouement. But Williams's film doesn't focus so much on the tension of getting there, but rather on understanding. Andrea Riseborough is an expert at this, displaying the same excellence she demonstrated in To Leslie (2022), but this time with a more striking childlike innocence, reflected in her pale, sallow complexion. The same goes for Brenda Blethyn, touching and natural as a wife and mother reduced to a mere welfare recipient, a degradation Colleen simply cannot tolerate.
Williams's films often end with a question mark, and that doesn't always satisfy. However, in Dragonfly, the questions raised are moral and timely, and will stay with you long afterward, as you think about women like Colleen and Elsie and the things missing in their lives. It's a mother's story.
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