Kevin Lally on Film

I’m certain there are some feel-good films at the Tribeca Festival—The Best You Can with Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, and She Dances with Steve Zahn and his daughter Audrey both look promising—but somehow I’ve wound up watching two undeniable feel-bad films. Each may be a hard sell, but they’re worth checking out for their deft performances.

Inside, from debuting Australian director Charles Williams, is the uncompromising story of 18-year-old Mel Blight (newcomer Vincent Miller), who’s been moved from a juvenile detention facility to an adult prison. Mel killed a fellow inmate while in juvie, and it’s clear he’s still wrestling with anger issues. Rather improbably, Mel in placed in the same cell with Mark Shepard (Cosmo Jarvis of TV’s “Shogun”), a notorious prisoner who raped and killed an 11-year-old girl when he was 13. Mark has found religion and conducts frequent services where he speaks in tongues, to catcalls from his “congregation.” Mel has brought with him a portable keyboard, and Mark persuades the boy to accompany his sermons on the bigger prison organ. After a while, Mel is transferred to the cell occupied by Warren Murfett (Guy Pearce), who’s been serving 15 years and is up for parole. But Warren is an even more unsavory mentor: Burdened with gambling debts, he enlists Mel in a plot to murder the despised Mark for a bounty.

Writer-director Williams has said his film was inspired by family members who served time in prison and a father who abandoned him as a child. The movie has a gritty, unsentimental authenticity and offers a nuanced perspective on its deeply flawed characters, tackling themes of fate, trauma, guilt, and redemption. Miller, with his haunted eyes, is a discovery, and Jarvis is fascinating as the perversely intense Shepard. And fresh off his first Oscar nomination for The Brutalist, Pearce again demonstrates what a compelling actor he’s always been.

Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn in Dragonfly. Photo: Lissa Haines-Beardow/Two Bungalow Films

The performances of two Oscar-nominated actresses are the chief reason to catch director Paul Andrew Williams’s Dragonfly, a character study that morphs into something startlingly dark. Brenda Blethyn (Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) plays Elsie, an elderly woman who needs home care after a recent fall. She lives by herself in a bungalow on a drab suburban street, visited infrequently by her middle-aged son, John (Jason Watkins). It’s a lonely life until she’s befriended by her next-door neighbor Colleen (Andrea Riseborough), a cranky woman whose only companion is her misbehaving bull terrier, Sabre. Colleen, who spends her days brooding at home, offers to pick up groceries and do other errands for Elsie. She’s also highly critical of Elsie’s impersonal home health aides, and after Elsie lashes out at one of them, Colleen offers to fill the gap. Elsie welcomes this warm new relationship, but things take an ominous turn when John comes to visit and takes an instant dislike to both Colleen and her dog.

Blethyn is adorably sweet and vulnerable as Elsie, so much so that the movie’s curve ball becomes doubly disturbing. But the film’s secret weapon is the gifted Riseborough, playing a mercurial, mysterious woman whose motives seem pure but are mixed with neurosis, bitterness, and instability. Dragonfly is anything but upbeat, but it’s a tale you won’t soon forget.

Riz Ahmed in Relay

I feel bad about Relay, not because it’s a feel-bad movie but because it’s such a lost opportunity. For the first three-quarters of the film, I truly felt I was watching one of the year’s outstanding efforts—a confident and original paranoid thriller reminiscent of Alan J. Pakula’s work in the 1970s. Director David Mackenzie’s credits include the excellent Hell or High Water and Starred Up, and here he and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens use New York City locations beautifully to tell the story of a covert organization that comes to the aid of corporate whistleblowers who are facing aggressive harassment. At the center of the story is Riz Ahmed as Ash, a fixer for the “Tri State Relay Service,” a messaging service that uses a system designed for deaf or hard-of-hearing people to enable anonymous communication between parties. Ash’s latest client is Sarah (Lily James), a researcher who stole incriminating documents from a biotech company and wants to negotiate their return after being threatened. Ash connects with Sarah in a way he hasn’t before, leading him to take some uncharacteristic risks; in the meantime, two detectives hired by the corporation (Sam Worthington and Willa Fitzgerald) are hot on the trail of both the fixer and his jittery customer.

Written by Justin Piasecki, the film maintains an unnerving tension via its depiction of a creepy surveillance subculture and the cat-and-mouse games that result. It’s a thriller setup we haven’t seen before, stylishly rendered, with compelling performances from Ahmed and James. How terribly disappointing it is, then, when a ridiculous third-act twist renders everything we’ve seen both formulaic and nonsensical. Bilge Ebiri, the film critic for New York magazine, has actually recommended that people exit the movie before the final ten minutes—and it’s not bad advice.

Pictured at top: Guy Pearce and Vincent Miller in Inside. Photo by Matthew Lynn.