When a young documentarian, Sam (Laurie Kynaston) takes a paid gig to shoot a portrait of the obscure noble Lady Isabella (Sian Clifford, Fleabag), what initially appears to be a vanity project for an entitled aristocrat quickly morphs into something much, much stranger and more off the wall. The mockumentary format is a hit-and-miss affair, for me at least, but Samuel Abrahams’s Lady makes excellent use of this stylistic approach and delivers something both hilarious and truly unusual, all anchored by an incredible, unhinged performance from Clifford. Think Absolutely Fabulous meets Grey Gardens by way of the Invisible Man.
Young martial artist Ria (Priya Kansara) wants to be a professional stunt performer. Her older sister, Lena (Ritu Arya), has dreams of being an artist, though she’s dropped out of art school. Problem is, their Pakistani immigrant parents, while indulgent of the whims of their children, have aims of their own. When the directionless Lena agrees to an arranged marriage to too-good-to-be-true doctor Salim (Akshay Khanna) and his family who may or may not have a nefarious endgame—Ria has an overactive imagination and is prone to flights of wild fancy, so who’s to say what’s real—it’s up to the younger sister to save the day. Or maybe just ruin the Big Day.
Though it takes a while to really find it’s footing, when it
does, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s horror anthology, Ghost
Stories, lives up to the hype it gathered on the festival circuit. The
film plays with genre tricks and tropes, with varying degrees of success, but
when the filmmakers finally break free, it builds into a clever and inventive
crescendo.
