Karlovy Vary International Film Festival: Dragonfly
In Dragonfly, Paul Andrew Williams delicately charts the fragile, fleeting bond between two neighbours – elderly Elsie (Brenda Blethyn) and younger Colleen (Andrea Riseborough) – whose lives, long separated by little more than thin brick walls, collide with devastating consequences. Riseborough is riveting as Colleen, a woman searching for meaning in small rituals, her days consumed by make-up tutorials and tentative, often half-hearted attempts at self-reinvention. The only true constant in her world is Sabre, her loyal yet intimidating white bully-breed dog – a creature burdened with class-coded symbolism and social stigma. Colleen defensively discloses that she is on benefits, a detail which, combined with her contentious choice of dog, situates her within a familiar and reductive social narrative that invites suspicion and snap judgments. John (Jason Watkins), Elsie’s emotionally distant, middle-aged son who pays for his mother’s carers, is openly wary of Colleen’s intentions.
Williams pointedly implicates the audience in these preconceptions, aware that we too have been primed by lurid headlines about elder scams and financial predators, like Rosamund Pike’s character in I Care a Lot (2020). Blethyn, meanwhile, delivers an equally powerful performance, adrift in a home saturated with floral fabrics, faded domesticity, and low, ominous lighting. Within this close, claustrophobic space, Colleen’s modest gestures of kindness begin innocently, but the film gradually reveals how poverty and social isolation can distort even the simplest acts, charging them with suspicion and risk.
Although Colleen and Elsie have been neighbours for years, they’ve barely known each other – a detail that sharpens Williams’s commentary on modern loneliness and the quiet gulf separating people who live side by side. John’s infrequent visits and long commute to his mother’s home speak volumes about urban isolation, even as his sudden interference sows the seeds of tragedy. The film’s climax is bleak, violent and subversive – an ending almost certain to spark tabloid headlines that would misrepresent Colleen as monstrous, erasing all the humanity the film has painstakingly revealed. In the end, Dragonfly is not just a gripping character study but an indictment of the systems and assumptions that fail the most vulnerable, and a tribute to the lives overlooked.
Christina Yang
Dragonfly does not have a release date yet.
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