Paul Andrew Williams (2025)

When Brenda Blethyn called time on Vera after fourteen seasons, she planned to take a break from acting.  When she received Paul Andrew Williams’ script for Dragonfly, she changed her mind.  Blethyn, who’ll be eighty early next year, plays Elsie, living alone in a semi-detached bungalow, on an anonymous housing estate in England in the present day.  Elsie and her late, much-missed husband moved there when the estate was first built, thirty-odd years ago.  After a recent fall, in which she broke a wrist, Elsie doesn’t get out of the house, not beyond her front garden anyway.  She watches television, much of the day.  Her main visitors are agency workers from social services, who help her shower and serve her up a ready meal (although she does some cooking independently).  Her few phone conversations are with her married son, John, who’s keen to tell his mother what she should and shouldn’t be doing, less keen on visiting her:  Elsie hardly ever sees John, let alone her grandchildren or daughter-in-law.  In the adjoining semi, Andrea Riseborough’s Colleen, Elsie’s neighbour for the past year or so, has her adored dog, Sabre, along with the TV, for company.  One day, Colleen calls at the door to ask if Elsie wants anything from the shops.  It’s the start of a gradually developing friendship between the two isolated women, and Colleen becomes Elsie’s de facto carer.  (She’s half Elsie’s age, but seems the lonelier of the pair.)  John’s voice on the phone is disapproving and increasingly suspicious of his mother’s new companion.  He (Jason Watkins) turns up in person to investigate what’s going on.

It’s easy to understand why Brenda Blethyn decided the part of Elsie was too good to miss, and Paul Andrew Williams supplies her and Andrea Riseborough with plenty of good, credible dialogue.  For at least the first hour (the whole film runs ninety-eight minutes), the situation is socially very well observed.  The narrative isn’t greatly eventful, but the leads’ acting (it’s virtually a two-hander), and the characters they bring to life, were more than enough to absorb this viewer.  In the later stages, things go badly wrong – for Elsie, for Colleen and for Dragonfly as a whole.  It’s not unusual, of course, that the makers of drama in which not much seems to happen, start to worry about their audience feeling short-changed.  But whatever Williams’ reasons, it’s hard to see why he needed to take such a violent route to his story’s destination.

Williams creates an obvious but effective contrast between Elsie, a woman with no secrets, and Colleen, whose shadowy past is only sketched in, through occasional scraps of conversation.  (She says she was abandoned by her birth mother as a child and brought up in foster care.)  It is clear, though, and soon, that Colleen has anger management issues.  Early on, watching different agency workers come and go from Elsie’s, Colleen decides one hasn’t put in a full hour, and has a go at the woman.  One aspect of the set-up is a puzzle, well before the film goes off the rails.  Williams, who filmed in and around the town of Knottingley in West Yorkshire, may have wanted to give the impression the story could be happening anywhere in the country, but the agency workers (who include Rochenda Sandall and Sandra Huggett) and people working in local shops mostly have northern accents.  What’s more, Elsie, who has a London accent, tells her son, when he asks why she doesn’t move closer to him and his family, that she doesn’t want to go ‘up North’.  So where does she live?

Colleen’s West Country accent is no problem because we assume she’s moved around.  And the larger uncertainty about her personality, and her motives for befriending Elsie, makes it easier to accept things that aren’t fully explained, at least as they relate to Colleen.  At one point, she’s going to have tea with Elsie, and tells her to be prepared for a surprise.  Colleen, who doesn’t wear make-up, then watches an online cosmetics tutorial and paints her face, before abandoning the attempt, and throwing out the various make-up she bought for the occasion.  The episode is frustrating, though:  Williams has shown Elsie getting tea things ready, in pleased anticipation of Colleen’s visit, but then omits the old woman’s reaction to her guest’s not turning up.  There’s no suggestion that Elsie, next time they meet, asks what happened.  The narrative has been so painstakingly gradual – with small domestic developments meaning a good deal to both characters – that this seems a cheat.  But it pales into insignificance beside the plotting in the closing stages.

The title derives from James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks, a quote from which is the film’s epigraph:  ‘Time is for dragonflies and angels.  The former live too little and the latter live too long’.  Dragonfly is also a dual give-a-dog-a-bad-name story.  Colleen and Sabre are kindred spirits and mutually devoted.  Sabre sleeps on Colleen’s bed (taking up a good half of the available space); the sweet-natured dog’s bark is decidedly worse than its bite.  Yet John’s short visit is enough to confirm his prejudice against both Colleen, because she lives on benefits, and her large, white American Bulldog.  Thanks to contact from John, the police forcibly remove the dog, and Sabre is euthanised.  Colleen is furiously distraught and Elsie, when she finds out what’s happened, hardly less distressed.  John, now a phone voice again, explains to his mother that the dog is a banned breed.

This alas is only the beginning of the end – by which point the fact that American Bulldogs aren’t a banned breed in the UK seems a minor implausibility.  When John visits a second time, Colleen stabs him fatally in his car (though how she manages to intercept the car before it reaches the bungalow, I didn’t understand).  In Elsie’s kitchen, Colleen slits her wrists and bleeds to death.  When Elsie desperately tries to help, she slips in Colleen’s blood, and crashes down, knocking herself out.  The closing scene shows Elsie staring into space, one in a row of old women in a care home.  Sabre’s death would have made for a sufficient tragic climax to Dragonfly and got Williams to where he wants to get to.  Colleen is kind to Elsie, unlike John or the perfunctory agency workers, but the loss of her beloved animal could have been enough for her to break off contact, increasing the risk of a domestic accident for Elsie and a decision being made that she was no longer capable of living at home.  The traumatic horrors of the last few minutes upend Dragonfly:  they’re way too big for the story.

Yet Brenda Blethyn, Andrea Riseborough and the best of Paul Andrew Williams’ writing and direction make you glad and grateful this film got made, and I’m going to try to remember the positives.  Colleen decides it would be good to get a two-way radio so that Elsie and she can ‘chat easily’ when each is in her own home.  The radio is eventually put to unhappier use but the sequence where Colleen sets it up and, from another room, instructs Elsie on how to get started, includes one of the best film lines of the year – a line that also gives a flavour of Dragonfly’s humour, which won’t be very evident from what I’ve so far put in this note.  Colleen explains that, to speak through the device, Elsie needs to press a button on the side of the handset.  Daunting technology guarantees brain freeze.  Elsie pauses for a moment, then replies, ‘Do you mean the side on the side or the side on the front?’  I could really relate to that.

20 November 2025