Tallinn Winner ‘Lady,’ With Sian Clifford, Unpacked by Samuel Abrahams

“Activist,” “muse,” “empath,” “icon” read credits for four photo shots of Lady Isabella Ravenhyde in Samuel Abrahams’ buzzy and tenderly comic mockumentary “Lady,” packing a tour de force performance by Sian Clifford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s control-freak elder sister in “Fleabag.”

Tallinn’s best director winner in its First Feature Competition on Saturday, “Lady”’s “icon” pose has Clifford as Isabella, dry martini glass in hand, astride a big pink rubber flamingo on the lawn of the Hall’s huge landscaped park. “I’m the aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians,” she tells Sam, a filmmaker still awaiting his big breakthrough whom she hires for a Netflix documentary on her.

Trouble is, a vampish aristo reality TV star meriting her own show in her dreams, now in her forties, the biggest gig she’s scored to date is co-hosting at the Hall “Stately Stars,” an annual kids talent show which she pays for. Netflix hasn’t heard of the documentary either. But as Sam begins to shoot his doc, thinking he’s found a hilarious one-can-short-of-a-sixpack cross between Norma Desmond and the Mitfords, Isabella begins literally to disappear, and more moving dimensions to her behaviour emerges. 

“Lady” was shot at Suffolk’s Somerleyton Hall, a magnificent, sprawling Tudor-Jacobean country house which was given an stunning Anglo-Italianate makeover over 1843-50. 

Already a buzz title before its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 16, “Lady” marks Abraham’s feature debut after he scored a BAFTA nomination for 2010 short “Connect.” “Lady” has gleaned glowing reviews in the U.K., The Guardian’s for instance, hailing “an outrageous barnstormer in this bizarre mockumentary comedy” that plays “like a scuzzier, shroomier B-side to “Saltburn,’” giving it four-and-a-half stars out of five.   

“Lady” saw two sold-out screenings at Tallinn which marked the film’s international premiere on Nov. 20. It will be released in U.K. cinema theaters in 2026.      

Co-written by Abrahams and his partner Miranda Campbell Bowling, “Lady” also stars Laurie Kynaston (“Cradle to Grave”) as the eager-beaver filmmaker Sam and Juliet Cowan (“Back to Black”) as Isabella’s long-suffering housekeeper. MetFilm Studio produced “Lady” and is handling its international sales. Variety talked to Abrahams the day after his “magical night” at Tallinn on Friday, just back in the U.K. but with a big smile written large across his face after his award. It will almost certainly not be the film’s last. 

“Lady” seems to me to represent, especially in its early going, the tragedy of much of modern mankind which would love to be the star of its own reality TV show yet has a sense of growing invisibility. But maybe I’m wrong….

The film doesn’t really specifically deal with technology or reality TV but it touches on that modern compulsion or obsession of wanting the world to look at us and give us validation, a sort of warm hug, when in fact technology is making us lonelier.

That need for validation is seen most immediately in Isabella but broadens out to Sam the director in the film whom Isabella accuses in a moment of catty lucidity of fearing that he will be exposed as a talentless coward with nothing to say….   

The spark, the initial idea, came from watching YouTube clips of people making their first posts, aspiring to be influencers, but clearly with no idea of how to present themselves, which was just really interesting. Every decision they were making was completely off – the song choices, the editing, just the subject matter. Their decisions were so bizarre and strange, and I was hooked on it. So, obviously, I subscribed. The audience was very small, probably only three people watching, but I was one of them. And I thought, this is so interesting. 

And not just because the clips were so bad?

Yes, it wasn’t just the car crash kind of perspective but also because it’s really related to Isabella’s wanting to put stuff out into the world and wanting an audience, because it’s exactly the same thing that I’m going through. I’m sort of in a way hiding more behind the work. She’s exposing herself and putting herself on the line and I’m making films and writing them and then getting actors to be in them. So it’s even more cowardly.

So you’d admit to a parallel between Sam the director of the film and Sam the director in the film…..

Yes. It was funny when Tallinn announced that the director award goes to Samuel Abrahams and then played a clip of Sam in the film introducing himself to housekeeper Becky, a clip of this director saying, hi, I’m Sam, I’m trying to make this movie. I think some people in the room were wondering: ‘Wait a minute, what’s, who is this?’

Reviewing the film some critics talk of its magic realism. But would you buy that?

It’s just a sort of a label, but helpful for people to sort of give it a kind of frame, to understand it. That said, when conceiving the idea for the film I didn’t set out out to make magical realism or necessarily even something surreal….

So where does it come from?

It came out of the character. I grew up on high concept ‘90s movies, like where Bill Murray repeats the same day over and over again. Or you can climb inside John Malkovich’s head or Jim Carrey can’t lie. There’s something about those ideas that are big, silly, cinematic, surreal conceits that drew me in. And then by the end of the movie, they’re delivering some kind of deep human meaning. When developing this character of Isabella as someone who was nakedly, desperately wanting the world to see her, it felt like a wicked curse I could bestow on her to watch her vanishing limb-by-limb towards complete invisibility and disappearance and oblivion.

At the get go, you collect a collage of shots of Isabella in death positions harking back to Agatha Christie when her supposedly dead body lies in a conservatory or to Japanese horror in the shot of a figure under a white sheet. The film constantly teases the audience what way it could go. Did that structure take a lot of time to develop?

There was a lot of urgency with this film in its creation right from the get-go. Once I had the character, about 18 months later we were shooting. So it was pretty quick. I wrote the script with Miranda, who’s also my partner. Sometimes when you’re writing, it can be very speculative, which it has been for me in the past, like if I was going to make this movie, this is what I’d want it to be. In this case, however, we knew the film was happening. It needed to get done.

I imagine one turning point was securing Sian Clifford as the film’s star. 

It was a very exciting moment. Sian is so talented and so funny and has delivered such a sort of layered performance with this great sort of vulnerability at its core. When we sent the script to her, she read it and said resonated with her and that she loved it. So we really hit it off, and she was an incredible collaborator and we’re very, very proud of her performance.

And where do you go from here? 

Miranda and I have started writing the next one, which feels like a really clear evolution of the tone of voice,  the kind of vibe of this film but just bigger…

And how would you describe your tone of voice? I’d say you’re touchingly comic. But would you agree? 

I love that. It’s great. But it’s very hard thing because before you’ve made the film, no one really knows what it is. Ultimately, the tone comes from all the decisions that are made to piece together this final movie, this story and, and how the story is being told. I suppose the things that interest me with tone is like finding a kind of vulnerability to characters and bringing that out – the truthfully strange peculiarities of human behaviour, avoiding the generic and finding the really kind of specific strangeness to the characters.