On its surface, Samuel Abrahams’ Lady appears to be a familiar entry in the recent “eat the rich” cinematic trend, trailing in the wake of high-profile films like Saltburn, Parasite, The Menu and Triangle of Sadness. However, there is more to this surrealist film.
Here the setting is Ravenhyde Hall, a country estate in Suffolk where Lady Isabella (played by Sian Clifford) resides in eccentric isolation. The 40-something Isabella has decided that she is “aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians” and is determined to become a modern influencer and artist. To facilitate this pivot, she hires Sam (Laurie Kynaston), a struggling young filmmaker desperate for a Bafta-winning breakthrough.
The film’s central irony lies in Isabella’s visibility. By virtue of her title, wealth and enormous home, she ought to be impossible to ignore. Yet, Isabella feels profoundly unseen.
The narrative’s most striking surrealist conceit begins when Isabella physically starts to disappear. The invisibility metaphor points to the diminishing cultural visibility of ageing women in a society that treats female bodies as commodities. Isabella attempts to become an aristocratic Kardashian at precisely the moment she fears she is disappearing from the world.
For Sam, Isabella only becomes a truly compelling subject when she begins to vanish; the more of her identity that is obliterated, the more valuable the footage becomes to him as content.
Initially, the film delights in mocking Isabella’s outlandish creative mission. Her wealth gives her the freedom to turn every private whim into a publicly consumable spectacle. However, as the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that Isabella is as much an instrument of the satire as its target. Her narcissism, we learn, is rooted in a deep, psychological avoidance of reality. When her hands begin to turn invisible, she simply hides them in gloves. When the condition is suggested to be a symptom of perimenopause, she dismisses it entirely.
Beneath Isabella’s performance of the “tortured artist” lies a history of genuine grief: a loveless marriage of convenience and the devastating loss of her only child. Her determination to remain the centre of attention is an elaborate strategy for avoiding everything she cannot bear to confront.
In one of the film’s most revealing exchanges, Sam accuses her of being self-obsessed. She indignantly corrects him, stating she is “self-centred” rather than “self-obsessed”. This distinction, while absurdly self-important, captures the essence of her struggle: she has turned her suffering into an artistic project where even her pain must be reconfigured as an act of self-expression, effectively shielding her from the world outside herself.
As Isabella becomes a more sympathetic and vulnerable figure, the satirical focus shifts toward Sam. He views himself as an objective truth-teller, the professional documentarian who can see through Isabella’s ridiculousness. Yet, he is revealed to be every bit as performative and exploitative as his subject.
When he captures footage of Isabella at her most unhinged and vulnerable, he is eager to package it into a sizzle reel for Netflix. The cruelty of his position is laid bare when Isabella asks why she looks “old and crazy” in the footage, and Sam replies with shocking brutality that it is because she is old and crazy. He is not, as he claims, objectively observing her madness and decay but instead facilitating it as part of a bid to ultimately profit from it.
While comparisons to Saltburn are common due to the country house setting, eccentric wealth and giant inflatable pink flamingo, Lady’s satirical method is actually closer to the black comedies like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Like these narratives, Lady begins with outrageous, comic behaviour but gradually gives way to a grim psychological reality.
Samuel Abrahams
The film reaches its emotional and narrative climax at “Stately Stars”, an annual talent contest Isabella sponsors for local children. In a move that highlights her total lack of social awareness, Isabella decides to compete in the contest herself. Her performance is a raucous, surreal display: she appears naked, wearing a giant raven’s head that seems to float above her now fully invisible body. However, the moment of resolution occurs when she turns her attention away from her own performance to help Sam, who suffers from crippling public-speaking anxiety. By helping him perform one of her poems, she confronts a reality outside herself, which paradoxically reverses her physical disappearance.
Ultimately, Lady concludes with a serious argument hidden behind its obvious gags about eccentric aristocrats. It suggests that in a culture of relentless performance of identity, the obsessive attempt to make the self visible is precisely what threatens to erase it. Isabella and Sam spend the film looking at themselves, one in front of the lens and one behind it, while failing to truly see one another.
The film’s aggressively wholesome final message is that looking beyond your own ego is the only route to becoming truly visible to yourself. In a world that demands we turn our lives into spectacle, the most radical act of self-knowledge may simply be the decision to look outward.
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