Dragonfly | Russell Hobbs British Film Festival 2025

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https://britishfilmfestival.com.au/films/bff25-dragonfly

Date Reviewed: 01/11/2025

If you love a film that keeps you guessing until the end, you’ll appreciate Dragonfly. It’s a tense and unsettling drama written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams, that uses silence and doubt to build suspense. 

The narrative revolves around an elderly woman Elsie (Brenda Blethyn) and her neighbour Colleen (Andrea Riseborough). Both lead isolated, lonely, mundane existences. Colleen’s only companion is her dog, while Elsie receives the occasional call from her son, and impersonal visits from in-home care providers. Their loneliness is heartbreaking, until they form what at first appears to be a genuine friendship. Colleen is connecting with the mother figure she never truly had, and Elsie is receiving care from someone who she knows and trusts. Yet all the while you have a sense that something’s not quite right. By the denouement, you’re sure a lot of things are in fact, very wrong. 

Andrea Riseborough plays Colleen with tensile restraint. She moves through the frame like someone who has spent a lifetime learning how to be useful without taking up room. The stillness is strategic, a vessel for micro-shifts that tell you more than any speech could. You see calculation give way to care, and care turn back into calculation, each transition measured to the millimetre. Riseborough displays a delicacy to her timing that keeps the moral weather changing from scene to scene, so the film never settles into a fixed reading of motive.

Brenda Blethyn is always a pleasure to watch in action and this is no exception. Her Elsie is warm and resilient. She brings a lived-in musicality to ordinary lines, and her physical choices do a great deal of the storytelling. It’s lovely to see Blethyn honour the character’s age without reducing her to fragility. She allows humour to surface in the cracks, which earns the film its moments of grace and lifts what otherwise could be a completely bleak outing.

Jason Watkins, as John, threads ambiguity without flashing neon signals at the audience. He understands that suspicion is most potent when it remains plausible. His scenes adjust the film’s centre of gravity, tilting us toward several equally credible outcomes. The triangle that forms is not built on plot mechanics so much as on the friction of incompatible needs, and Watkins’ precision ensures the tension accumulates rather than erupts.

Williams’ direction is patient and exact with measured pacing throughout. The visual language favours natural light and cold, muted tones. Interiors feel genuinely lived in, with a production design that resists both twee clutter and empty austerity. Costuming is similarly articulate in its quietness, signalling the characters’ habits and means without speechifying. The pacing is measured and the editing favours psychological continuity over momentum. 

The film could have more of a ‘gut punch’ of an ending if they had rolled credits one scene sooner. One can imagine a meeting in which it was discussed whether or not the audience would ‘get it’ without the final moment. It seems a strange choice from a film which, until that point, treats the audience as if we have a modicum of intelligence and film literacy. Dragonfly asks us to sit with uncertainty for 99% of its running time, only to make certain we have no doubt about how things ended for Elsie. 

There is much to admire in how the film aligns every department around a unifying principle: let behaviour carry meaning. Camera placement respects the actors’ space. Design decisions earn their realism. Music knows when silence is the stronger choice. Performances locate dignity in vulnerability and menace in kindness. This is not a thriller disguised as a character study. It is a character study with the pulse of a thriller, which is harder to achieve and far more rewarding.

Dragonfly lingers because it recognises that loneliness can be both a problem and a lure, that help can look like control when the scales are tipped, and that trust, once broken, does not shatter so much as bruise. Riseborough, Blethyn, and Watkins give three distinct, impeccably tuned portraits of people navigating that bruised territory. Williams shapes the encounter with unsentimental compassion. The result is a film that’s wonderfully unpredictable and well considered. 


Reviewed by Kitty Goodall