Andrea Riseborough & Brenda Blethyn Are Friends With Disbenefits in the Unnerving 'Dragonfly' (Tribeca Film Festival)

The pandemic is never mentioned in writer-director Paul Andrew Williams’ deeply unnerving psychological thriller Dragonfly, which stars Oscar nominees Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn as lonely neighbors who become fast friends before it all unravels in a very bad manner. And yet the shadow of our lives lived in COVID-19’s catastrophic wake feels very much present in the film—isolated people quivering on the edge of mental unwellness, ready to disassemble at the slightest provocation. Everything teeters on the blackest abyss, and the tension Williams mounts across the movie’s quick-moving ninety-eight minutes turns, at times, to nigh unbearable. (That’s a hearty recommendation, P.S.)

If you’ve seen Bull, Williams’ also ace 2021 movie starring the great Neil Maskell (Kill List)—playing a man who returns to his hometown a decade after disappearing to extract revenge from those who wronged him and his loved ones—then you know Williams is a director capable of wringing maximum dread from the most unlikely of sources. (Which is also to say if you have not seen Bull, go do.) And he’s authored himself another doozy of a situation with Dragonfly, which in a different creator’s hands could’ve turned into a heartwarming tale of lost souls finding connection. Awww. But not here! Definitely not.

Blethyn plays Elsie, an elderly woman who lives alone and has recently had a fall that’s left her one arm seriously injured. She can barely get anything done that she needs to, so a series of indifferent carers paid for by Elsie’s faraway son show up daily to see to those needs, all in the vaguest manner possible. They check boxes off a list while paying the woman herself little to no personal attention as they do—scrub her down, shove some food and some pills in her face, and out the door as quick as they came.

Elsie lives on a street of identical little houses—small squares where nobody else is ever seen about. No kids playing in any yards. No traffic. If you told me this is an abandoned place, one of those ghost suburbias, I’d believe you. But there’s an exception—the other half of Elsie’s house does indeed have a human being living there. One who’s been watching the abrupt comings and goings of those nurses with simmering irritation. Her name is Colleen (Riseborough) and she’s just about fed up — with these non-caring carers; with her dog Saber, who won’t stop barking or digging up Elsie’s flowers; with her own reflection in the mirror.

One day Colleen says enough is enough and knocks on Elsie’s door to see how she’s doing. One trip to the store for some milk later, the two begin taking a series of small, hesitant steps toward what seems like a genuine friendship that benefits them each. The two women couldn’t be more different. Elsie is polite and old-fashioned, while Colleen is very much neither of those things. But they manage to find common ground in their loneliness and the many hours of the day that they need filling up.

As the women grow friendlier, Colleen becomes more open with her hostility toward the carers who aren’t doing their job of seeing to Elsie’s needs. So almost as a lark, Elsie suggests Colleen do the job—a lark that Colleen immediately snatches at. After all, she’s not doing anything else. Indeed, it’s curious how empty Colleen’s life is, the more we see of it. She’s always home. Just her and her dog staring out the window, sneering at the world. She doesn’t even seem to sleep at night.

Williams manages to keep us tightly wound from almost the start of Dragonfly, unsure just what sort of person Colleen is, and how much of a mistake (if any!) Elsie is making in letting this stranger come in. Colleen’s backstory remains tantalizingly opaque—how long these two have lived on opposite sides of the same wall isn’t even clear. And this sort of role couldn’t have been handed to a finer choice of actress; if there’s any performer today who can work wonders with dubious opacity, it’s Riseborough, a chameleon of unrelenting incisiveness.

As a brief aside, I’ll mention a relevant anecdote here. Full admission: Riseborough is considered an acting god in my house. I watched the screener of this film on my couch, and my partner wandered into the room. He stopped to watch a little of it with me. Yet after a minute, I could tell it hadn’t registered, and so I asked him, my trusty compatriot in total Riseborough worship, “Who is that?” He paused for a moment. Then you could see it register. “How does she do that???” he asked loudly, excitedly.

Who can answer? Andrea Riseborough is a slippery magician. We’ve come to adore her precisely because she keeps going out of her way to find small worth-her-time character studies like Dragonfly, where she can turn that slipperiness into its own pure spectacle. Nobody makes me lean in like she does. Since this character of Colleen is unknowable, you go and you hire the most unknowable actor around to play her if you can get her, and thankfully, Williams did. This is yet another knockout turn from the steadiest stream of them going—Riseborough is always the ace in the sleeve of any movie.

Which isn’t to under-value the excellent work from Blethyn here. Often, Riseborough acts everybody else off the screen, but Elsie is every ounce of human and lived-in and relatable that Colleen is absolutely none of those things. Blethyn makes us completely understand why Colleen’s rising indignation on her behalf would snap Elsie out of her own daze—even if Colleen’s motives remain dubious (and Elsie clocks this more than once); the power of will radiating off of this strange woman is intoxicating. It makes Elsie feel alive, when everything else seemed to be headed in a different direction.

The film itself trembles and tunes perfectly into that same anger that Riseborough thrums with. As that other lesser version of this movie would tell you, there can be relief and delight in watching lost souls find and fight for one another. The problem is just that sometimes souls go lost for good reasons. Really good ones. And good intentions can go sideways, upside-down, soured as milk spilled on the floor. As gasoline leaking into the cracks of the pavement. Executed by two wondrous performers, Dragonfly is the black hole of modern living opening up beside your morning cuppa. The mundanity undone, drowning with the dishes.