THE STORY – “Lady” is an absurdist comedy about a lonely, self-obsessed aristocrat who dupes a struggling, opportunistic director into filming her every move. While pursuing her artistic expression, Lady Isabella’s life takes a surreal turn as she realizes that if she’s not in the spotlight, she might just disappear.
THE CAST – Sian Clifford, Laurie Kynaston, Juliet Cowan & Olisa Odele
THE TEAM – Samuel Abrahams (Director/Writer) & Miranda Campbell Bowling (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 95 Minutes
Samuel Abrahams’ mockumentary opens with Lady Isabella (Siân Clifford) face-down on a staircase. Your first thought is a staged tumble, a woman fishing for attention in the vein of “Leave Her to Heaven.” Then the film cuts to her draped over other surfaces, her face planted in a plate of flower petals, all in a hot-pink outfit with lime-green gloves and socks. The imagery is hypnotic and peculiar and perfectly captures the character before she’s even introduced.
We meet her through the first-person view of a documentary crew, specifically the documentary’s BAFTA-nominated director, Sam (Laurie Kynaston), who is nervous but hooked by the mystery of a subject they know little about. As they arrive at Ravenhyde Hall, its grandeur is overwhelming. A raven perched on the gate is ominous and, given the place’s name, apt.
Then Isabella arrives, and the amusement starts immediately. She poses and struts for the lens in awkward, deliberate bursts, dressed in clashing patterns and textures, flirting with the camera as she leads a tour through rooms of marble busts and taxidermy. She claims Netflix has had her and the house in its sights for ages, waiting for the right moment to pounce. When Sam asks why now, she deflects; he asks again, and she deflects again. Early in the film, it shows a gap between what she says and what may be true.
The question becomes: who exactly is this woman? Sam wants to know, the audience wants to know, and Isabella may not know herself. Everything she offers up rings false, from her insistence on having many friends to her claim of having a son away at boarding school. When her maid Becky (Juliet Cowan) wanders into frame, she snaps that the maid’s presence damages the “image” she’s curating. The aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians, she calls “action” and “cut” on herself, casts herself as a humanitarian, activist, icon, and patron of the arts, and never lets the camera stop. The occasion for this documentary centers on Stately Stars, her annual talent show for underprivileged children, which she has decided to enter and win. The notion is ridiculous, and nobody in her orbit seems to think she’s anything but difficult and a joke. Sam is exasperated within days.
The craft leans into the mask. The handheld camera darts through the house too fast for Sam or us to absorb anything, mirroring a person who is all over the place. The production design goes further: each room matches her personality. The grandiosity reads as camouflage, a woman piling on excess because the grounded alternative would force her to look inward. You feel that from the opening minutes – a real achievement in character building. A shot of her silhouette frozen in a window, ghost-like, is one of the best images in the film. The screen also shifts to film, creating a vintage quality that works as chapter breaks. Those scenes are the most artful in the film.
Then comes the turn that lifts the narrative out of its amusing quirkiness. Sam’s agent calls to say Netflix has never heard of her and this documentary project is basically a sham. Isabella responds that Netflix hasn’t heard of her yet. Sam wants out, but she doesn’t want him to leave. “If you leave, who’s going to film me?” she asks. When Sam replies that she doesn’t actually do anything and just swans around a giant castle raving about a kids’ talent show, she pleads for him to keep filming. Clifford plays this with the intensity of someone clinging to a ledge. As the crew threatens to walk, Isabella’s hands vanish.
It’s bold and creative to capture wanting to be seen and failing in such a literal way: Isabella slowly beginning to fade away. Her literally becoming invisible also works as a reveal of her deep loneliness and grief that we learn is why she is so desperate to create an image to escape herself. As her situation worsens, she treats her affliction as a gift, the kind that can lift an artist above the ordinary. She compares herself to Van Gogh and his ear, Frida Kahlo and her unibrow. She wants to be the canvas, the paint, and the brush at once. The writing captures how her life has become performance art.
Clifford is perfect for this role. She showed her range in “Fleabag,” with it hard to imagine anything topping her comedic delivery in that iconic haircut scene. But you see her here and realize she’s built to surprise. She plays Isabella as always slightly drunk and close to a breakdown, while finding sadness underneath it all, especially when Isabella is alone in a vast room, and you feel the weight of what she has tried to curate. She hasn’t left the house in five years. She says everything she needs is at home, but we see she has nothing meaningful there. “Grey Gardens” comes to mind, another film built on the unpredictability of putting a huge personality in front of a lens, and another pair of reclusive women alone with their interiority.
Kynaston keeps pace, and his performance feels so unforced you forget it’s a performance, which makes it as effective as it is in mockumentary form. Sam’s looks to camera, a silent “what the hell,” express what the audience is thinking. We also learn vulnerable things about him, making him more than a one-note director character. His bond with Isabella is surprising: two mismatched people who find something in each other. Their closeness goes too far under the influence, leaving Sam uncomfortable afterward, and a conflict over the film’s vision puts Isabella’s self-centredness front and center. All the while, she pulls Sam out of himself, pushing him past crippling anxieties.
The mockumentary style helps us connect with a complex character and is the best form to capture the layers as they reveal themselves. But because Isabella’s fabrications keep us guessing, we often can’t tell what’s true, which can create a disconnect at times. The schtick wears thin, especially around the preparations for Stately Stars. Still, the time spent with her character is worth it in the end, especially as truths surface and you understand why she fabricates and wants to be someone else. She’s a broken person who lost herself in grief, and the writing shows real depth. She gets a full arc, and by the end you’re watching a different person than the one whose only care was their image for the camera.
“Lady” is certainly odd and uneven at times, but it has a distinct voice and a lead performance that turns its strangeness into something both very amusing and tender.
