Glasgow Film Festival 2024 review

“Old age isn’t for sissies.” The G’s Ann (Dale Dickey) wouldn’t disagree with Bette Davis. If anything, she’d go further: in her world, the elderly are vulnerable and exploited to the point of being superfluous. She’s one of the few who fights back and doesn’t think twice about it.

Grandmother Ann, or The G, as her adoring granddaughter Emma (Romane Denis) calls her, has a distant relationship with her family, and her ailing husband’s son and wife are non-too-keen on her either. Targeted by a corrupt legal guardian (Bruce Ramsay), she and Chip (Greg Ellwand) soon find themselves turfed out of their home and into a care facility which is more of a prison. Convinced that they’re wealthier than they appear, the guardian bullies and abuses them until Chip dies and Ann decides to take back her life and digs into her past to take her revenge.

Ann knows herself all too well. She’d probably want her own words “I’m not a nice person. But I do have other qualities.” inscribed on her tombstone, but she has no plans to order one just yet. In a film that echoes the more satirical I Care A Lot (2020) where Rosamund Pike was the crooked legal guardian, Dickey abandons the gentle tones of her previous film, A Love Song (2022), in favour of a geriatric bad-ass with a no-shits-given-or-taken approach to the world and, with the exception of Emma, it responds to her in the same way. She’s not totally cold hearted, though. Aside from her affectionate relationship with Emma, there are other moments of unexpected intimacy and tenderness that show her other side, something she habitually keeps under wraps. It’s a rare role, one that offers an older actress the chance to show the realities of aging, instead of the more customary soft focus view encouraged by the likes of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. And, in putting the character in Dickey’s hands, director Karl R Hearne, has played a blinder.

A revenge thriller first and foremost, the film also shines an unflattering light on the care system, such as it is, for older people in the States and one loophole in particular. But, by viewing it through the victim’s eyes, a woman who is fatally underestimated by those attempting to exploit her, we have no choice but to admire her resilience, even if her methods are open to question. The director places the story in an ice cold world – literally – where the snow refuses to budge and the ground is like iron. To say it’s as frostbitten as Ann herself is no exaggeration.

A strong thriller, with a tense and skillfully woven plot, it’s lifted to another level by Dickey. Steely-eyed and tight-lipped – yet not without appeal to one of the other residents in the care home – she dominates the film in a performance that could ultimately define her career.

★★★★

Glasgow Film Festival 2024, 29^th February and 3^rd March / Dale Dickey, Romane Denis, Bruce Ramsay, Jonathan Koensgen, Christian Jadah, Greg Ellwand / Dir: Karl R Hearne / 3Buck Productions / Cert: tbc

Watch our Video Interview with Dale Dickey here.