Lady (2026)
I will be honest, for its first twenty minutes I was not at all sure about Lady, and then it pulled a swerve that completely won me over. What begins as a familiar cringe-comedy mockumentary quietly transforms into something far stranger, sadder and more ambitious, and by the end I was genuinely moved. Samuel Abrahams' debut is a clever, aching and very funny film, and it earns its four stars by being braver than it first lets on.
It opens in full mockumentary mode, all queasy handheld camera and awkward silences, introducing us to Lady Ravenhide, a gloriously deluded, attention-starved aristocrat played to perfection by Sian Clifford. The early going is deliberately cringeworthy in the best David Brent tradition, the comedy of a monstrously self-regarding figure who has no idea how she comes across, and Clifford is fearless in it. There is a nervous, put-upon housekeeper, Becky, who could have walked out of an Alan Partridge episode, and a running gag about the Netflix documentary Lady has conned a young director and his crew into believing they are making, when no such thing exists. She even locks them in. It is funny, if a little one-note, and I confess I worried the whole film might coast on that single joke.
It does not. Around the twenty-minute mark, Lady begins, literally, to turn invisible, and the film opens up into something I did not see coming. The device is inspired, a piece of magical realism that works as a brutally sharp metaphor for the way society stops seeing older women, and the film mines it for both dry comedy and real pathos. Every time Lady seeks help she is brushed off with a weary "oh, some women just feel like this as they get older," and the horror of being gradually erased, dismissed and unheard sharpens with every scene.
What makes it land is the backstory the film slowly reveals, which I will not spoil beyond saying it is quietly devastating and recontextualises everything, the desperate need for attention, the eccentricity, the drinking, the strange content empire she runs, even her bond with the young director. Suddenly the woman you were laughing at becomes someone you ache for, and the film pulls off that tonal shift, from farce to genuine tragedy, with real control.
Clifford is extraordinary throughout, holding the comedy and the heartbreak in the same performance, and the score does a lot of quiet work, swelling gently under the tender, melancholy moments without ever tipping into sentimentality. It is the sound of a film that knows exactly when to stop laughing at Lady and start grieving with her.
Four stars. Lady is that rare comedy that turns out to be about something deep and painful, a sly, surreal and ultimately heartbreaking portrait of loneliness and invisibility anchored by a superb Sian Clifford. Stick with the cringe of the opening act, because the film it becomes is something special. Highly recommended.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Red Shoes (1948), The Driver (1978), Interstellar (2014)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: These Violent Delights (2026), Macbeth in Compton (2026), Something Pointless (2026)
