Lady

How often do you watch films where you genuinely have no idea what the hell might happen around the next corner? Because in Lady, the directorial debut of Samuel Abrahams, there are no rules.

The film tells the story of Lady Isabella, a woman who owns a huge stately home and swims in seemingly endless money. Under a fake pretext, she organizes a documentary shoot about herself. The young, inexperienced documentary crew led by Sam, a filmmaker Lady Isabella found among the BAFTA nominees, doesn’t really understand what they are getting themselves into, but they approach the project with interest, trying to figure out what’s actually going on here. And there turns out to be a lot to figure out. Because alongside Lady Isabella’s eccentricity, she also starts disappearing. Literally. Her hands become transparent, and eventually, so does she. As all of this is happening, Sam and Lady Isabella start getting to know each other and discovering unexpected sides of one another, and all of it eventually leads to an epic finale during the talent show that Lady Isabella organizes every year for underprivileged children.

Believe me, there is no way to properly describe the plot of this film, because you just have to watch it. But this satirical mockumentary becomes a genuine surprise. While watching it, you will repeatedly find yourself asking: what the actual fuck? But the more you get into the story, and the more it unfolds and starts weaving all these interesting moments and subplots into itself, the more genuinely hooked you become. And most of all, Lady makes itself worth appreciating after it has ended, when you can finally look at the whole thing and understand what this story was actually about and what its point was.

Because, essentially, we start with a comedy about two incredibly self-centered, full-of-themselves people. On one side, there is Lady Isabella, who considers herself some kind of bohemian, great queen of art, an incredibly interesting and deeply complicated person, and tries to show all of this to her new friends, whom she hired to come and make a documentary about her. On the other side, we have young director Sam, who also considers himself some amazing truth-teller, but who quickly crosses the boundaries of what is acceptable with the subject of his documentary. Meanwhile, his own crew almost seems to decide to change the perspective of the documentary and starts following him instead, which slowly makes him lose his mind.

Eventually, these people, trapped inside the enormous but ultimately closed-off space of this huge estate, start breaking down. And each of them begins spilling out deeply personal moments. Lady Isabella, meanwhile, starts literally disappearing before our eyes as a visual representation of her own needs and inner tragedy.

I’ll be honest: somewhere around the middle, the film lost me a little bit. But the final part was absolutely worth the wait, because by the end everything becomes very bittersweet. Two self-centered pricks change something in each other because, at their lowest moments, they both needed the other person, and each of them came to the other for some kind of rescue. Sam helps Lady Isabella deal with the enormous bitterness, grief and trauma she experienced several years earlier, which turned her into that invisible woman who finally reveals herself as a person. And Lady Isabella helps Sam deal with his own insecurity and self-doubt.

The biggest diamond of this project is, of course, Sian Clifford, who will always have a special place in my heart because of her role as Claire, Fleabag’s sister, in the legendary Fleabag. And in this film, her comedic timing is simply impeccable. At the same time, watching her character slowly break down under the gaze of all those cameras pointed at her — the very cameras she wanted in the first place — and seeing the range of emotions she brings to the role is just fantastic. She is also perfectly matched by Laurie Kynaston, while Juliet Cowan, who plays the housekeeper, essentially becomes the film’s third character and fits into this trio perfectly.

Ultimately, Lady is a bit crazy, unhinged, rule-breaking project that offers you something fresh. I genuinely can’t remember the last time I saw something quite like this, and in the current reality, when we have so much different cinema coming out, both good and bad, being able to say that you have seen something truly unique is, well, quite an achievement.

7.5/10

Thanks to Obscured Releasing for the screener. Catch it in US cinemas in October.