‘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 town, 80-year-old Elsie (Brenda Blethyn) depends on the cursory thrice-weekly visits from an overstretched home carer. It is an impersonal and sometimes rather slapdash service, but Elsie does not like to make a fuss. When her 30-something neighbour Colleen (Andrea Riseborough) offers to help with the shopping, it sparks a friendship between these two women who have been relegated to the frayed edges of society. This initially subdued, superbly acted story of an unlikely connection takes a savage and unsettling tonal swerve in the final act. The latest from Paul Andrew Williams will not be for everyone, but it is a chokingly tense commentary on the precarious nature of community.

Packs an unexpectedly devastating punch

Playing Karlovy Vary after premiering at Tribeca Film Festival, where its two leads won the best performance in an international narrative feature award, Dragonfly is a welcome return to the big screen for London To Brighton director Williams, who, with the exception of his cracking, hyper-violent revenge thriller Bull (2021), has been working predominantly in television over the last decade or so. Many of his small-screen choices, such as the BBC TV movie Murdered By My Boyfriend and Disney+ limited series Suspect: The Shooting Of Jean Charles De Menezes, reflect his fascination with vulnerable lives, lived on the edge.

It is territory he revisits with this potent and unnerving drama: Elsie and Colleen are both the kind of people who are invisible until something – or someone – breaks. Phenomenal performances from both actresses – Riseborough’s work is in a similar, tightly wound and abrasive register as her Oscar-nominated turn in To Leslie – should be a lure for distributors looking for small-scale social commentaries that pack an unexpectedly devastating punch.

Elsie’s horizons have shrunk, frail and uncertain since a fall robbed her of autonomy. It is a challenge to navigate between the kitchen and living room, let alone out of the front door. Her connections to the world outside are her television, the dutiful phone calls from her son, and the front window view of the lawn and its polite little flower bed. The tentative physicality of Blethyn’s performance – the way she has to cling to the kitchen work surfaces as she makes a pot of tea – speaks eloquently of a woman whose home and sanctuary is now a place mined with challenges and hazards.

The production design gives an illuminating window into the lives of both the women. Colleen’s living space, a mirror image of Elsie’s but decorated more spartanly, speaks volumes about this lonely, damaged woman. There is little in her life apart from her dog, a big, intimidating-looking bull-breed of some kind named Sabre. During the day, Colleen sits, legs splayed, shoulders slumped, in a single chair placed in front of the house. At night, she shares her bed with the dog. A sign above her pillow, which reads ’Love lies here’, takes on an ache of poignancy as we realise just how little love there must have been in her life.

The affection between the two women seems genuine, although the score sounds a sporadic note of caution, suggesting Colleen’s mental state is not entirely reliable. But when things go wrong, it is not in the way that might initially have been expected. Key to the events that unfold in the final act is an excruciating visit from Elsie’s son John (an excellent Jason Watkins, squeezing every last drop of pursed-lipped passive aggression from a brief but pivotal cameo role). He doesn’t say as much – he doesn’t need to – but John is clearly suspicious of Colleen’s motives. He bridles at her presence in Elsie’s kitchen, silently tallies the number of biscuits she consumes. But most of all, he takes issue with Sabre – an aversion that will have fateful consequences.