Untitled Woman (2026)
Every so often a short film comes along with a performance at its centre so good that it carries you past any reservations you might have, and Untitled Woman, Camille Summers-Valli's elegant short film, is very nearly that. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival and admired a great deal of it, held back from the top marks only by a closing beat that rather lost me. Three and a half stars for a film that is for the most part really rather brilliant.
It is a meticulously composed character study of Dawn, a middle-aged woman who has come to feel invisible in a culture that prizes youth above almost everything, and who longs simply to be seen. The setting is an art class presided over by a charismatic teacher and populated by a delightful little group of eccentrics, all eager to look and to be looked at, and the film quietly turns the act of gazing into its whole subject. It is about who gets noticed, who gets overlooked, and what it does to a person to spend years feeling like the latter.
Julianne Nicholson, so good in everything from I, Tonya onwards, leads it beautifully. She plays Dawn with a wounded, watchful dignity that makes her ache to be appreciated feel absolutely real, and the film's loveliest movement is the one in which the class tips from Dawn being the observer to Dawn being the observed, taking her place as a life model and, for the first time, feeling genuinely valued. It is a warm, perceptive piece of work about late-life invisibility, and for a good while I was entirely under its spell. I will admit I also spent a fair bit of it quietly seething at Paul, one of the male characters, which I think is rather the point.
The craft throughout is exactly as the synopsis promises, elegant and precise, every frame considered, and Summers-Valli, who comes from a background in music video and photography, has a real eye for composition and for the charged business of looking.
Where it lost me is the ending. After all that careful, humane observation, the film suddenly tips into something jarringly violent, with Paul getting smashed over the head with a chair and blood going everywhere, which I took as some sort of pointed comment on men but which felt unnecessary and tonally off to me, a lurch into shock after so much subtlety. Three and a half stars. Untitled Woman is a graceful, quietly moving study of being unseen, anchored by a terrific Julianne Nicholson, and if it had trusted its own restraint right to the end I suspect I would be giving it more.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Uk: A Twist of Hate (2026), Sweet Bitter Sweet (2026), The Sorrows of Young Charlotte (2026)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: I Will Be Alright (2026), To the North (2026), Delisted (2026)
