Samuel Abrahams’ debut feature, Lady, playing in Tallinn Black Nights’ First Feature Competition following its world premiere at BFI London, presents itself as a rubbernecking documentary on a troubled individual, common on broadcast TV, although it’s fully staged. These films are typically called “mockumentaries”, but that term still isn’t a perfect descriptor for Lady, as it isn’t quite aiming to play with the audience’s expected standard of truth. It fits better in the category of “found footage”, typically a mode of modern horror, but here used by Abrahams as a unique visual means for his tone of manic fantasy-comedy.

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Sian Clifford, best known for her role in the late-2010s TV smash Fleabag, is the titular Lady Isabella, lonely as anything in her stately abode of Ravenhyde Hall. She’s a down-on-her-luck aristocrat chafing against the isolation brought on by her privilege. Laurie Kynaston is Sam, a bespectacled nebbish modelled on the director, mimicking his background in BAFTA-nominated shorts and adverts; he’s taking an apparent Netflix commission to follow Isabella as she pursues her dual ambitions of becoming a social-media influencer and a conceptual artist. A plot destination is provided by the Stately Stars talent show competition for local youth she sponsors, which she has the capricious and peculiar urge to enter herself.

If Isabella’s persona, manner and estrangement from reality are remote to us, her need for attention and to be seen is all too real – a point acknowledged by Sam himself, who wants public notoriety and acclaim in a more attainable sense, through boosting his underachieving film career. Abrahams and Miranda Campbell Bowling’s script is also sharp in identifying how documentary ethics can be disposed of on a whim: like the Maysles brothers when they met “Little” and “Big” Edie Beale in Grey Gardens, any respect and caution become secondary to the “what do we have here?” kind of delight when marvelling at a prime on-screen subject.

Helping the film’s early comparisons to Saltburn [+lire aussi :
critique
fiche film], Clifford’s portrayal seems to be trying to one-up all of the over-acted performances she’s likely seen (and endured through gritted teeth) in her BBC and West End stage days, all whooping sighs, swoons and comically elongated posh vowel sounds. When she begins gradually disappearing, commencing with her arms, body part by body part, it’s a development we accept given the film’s previous tonal and visual swagger – a bit of magical-realist outrageousness as a chaser to the cartoonishly heightened performances.

Shot quickly the previous autumn on a low budget, but with no shortage of sincerity and commitment, Lady doesn’t rise much above a lark, although like most comedies, it’s best seen with a crowd, where reactions of laughter are always more contagious. It might not bring the undeniable feature-film breakthrough that Abrahams is clearly wishing for, but it does show his skill at harnessing a kind of “anything goes” inspiration, and maintaining a tone of squirming, off-balance discomfort – that true lingua franca of British humour.

Lady is a UK production staged by MetFilm Studio, with international rights held by its sales arm, MetFilm Sales.