Lady

After the release of Grey Gardens, the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary, the filmmakers were challenged. Their film followed an eccentric mother-daughter duo in their dilapidated East Hampton mansion, but some felt it was iffy to put two seemingly mentally unwell women on display. In 2014, Albert Maysles defended their motives and subjects, saying: ‘Their behaviour was just their way of asserting themselves. And what could be a better way to assert themselves than a film about them asserting themselves?’

That enthusiastic spirit has been channelled in Samuel Abrahams' feature debut Lady, an evocatively weird mockumentary with Fleabag's Siân Clifford throwing herself into the bonkers lead role. Yet, her Lady Isabella, a lonely, self-absorbed member of the English aristocracy, takes the reins. She employs up-and-coming director Sam (Laurie Kynaston) to film the aristocrat gallivanting around her far more pristine estate than Grey Gardens – you might recognise Somerleyton Hall from The Crown – in a delectably exuberant wardrobe styled by costume designer Terri Higgins. 

Lady Isabella is a product of immense wealth, privilege and a narcissistic social media culture that believes their every move is worth documenting, so she dupes Sam into thinking Netflix is backing the project about her ‘journey of artistic discovery’. This mainly involves submitting herself into the manor's annual ‘Stately Stars’ talent contest; never mind that it's for children. 

Fleabag's Siân Clifford throws herself into the bonkers lead role

Cue Clifford singing disastrously on the piano, drawing Sam like a French girl and producing surrealist multimedia art all over the grounds. Kynaston plays Sam's increasing discomfort with hilarious awkwardness. However, he is by no means an innocent bystander; the camera crew capture his own superiority complex as a filmmaker desperate to level up and willing to exploit the lady of the house once she inexplicably begins to turn invisible.

It's here that Abrahams and Miranda Campbell Bowling's script becomes less of an eat-the-rich satire and more of a Charlie Kaufman-esque exercise in empathy. The absurdity of Lady Isabella's visual decay is cannily achieved with VFX, yet even as her body fades away, she has never been more revealing. 

Vignettes of her provocative artistic expression serve as high contrast with the dryly humorous but affecting moments between Sam, Isabella and her timid housekeeper, played with quiet resolve by Juliet Cowan.

By the final calamitous spectacle, Clifford and Kynaston rip off the bandaids from Isabella and Sam's inner wounds, in a raucously sentimental display of spoken word, wit and human fragility. A ‘feel-good’ ending might be the wrong phrase; ‘feel better’ seems more apt. With Lady, Abrahams cuts to the core of what every person, rich or poor, sane or remarkably batty, yearns for: to be seen, to be held, to be reminded that you matter – with or without an audience. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Aug 14.