Fantasia 2024 Review: Dale Dickey is Utterly Compelling in ‘The G’
Dale Dickey proves she’s more than just a character actor in Karl R. Hearne’s revenge thriller, The G, which screened at Fantasia Festival on Friday. The film follows 72-year-old Ann (Dickey), a rough-looking woman with a no-fucks attitude and a husky voice, the kind of person who gets kicked out of their knitting group for bad behaviour, lives in a messy house with piles of dirty dishes, and discards vodka bottles by smashing them on the pavement. Underneath her tough exterior, however, is love for Emma (Romane Denis), her granddaughter, and Chip (Greg Ellwand), her chronically ill husband, whose caring duties she’s slipping on. She also harbours a great deal of pain, perhaps decades of it, which have hardened her into the vodka-drinking, chain-smoking, acerbic woman she is today.
Set during a harsh winter, Ann and Chip become the victims of a court-appointed guardianship. After moving them into a facility in the middle of the night, their guardian, Rivera (Bruce Ramsay), gets to work selling their house and liquidating their assets. Convinced that Ann has hidden savings, Rivera tries threatening her into revealing their whereabouts, but Ann is not one to give up so easily. Left with no money, no husband, and no home beyond the facility, Ann is not about to go down without a fight. Meanwhile, Emma tries to help by being ruthless like Ann, who she calls “The G” (the Granny), but it ends up being a lot harder than it looks.
The film, which was also written by Hearne, highlights the real elder abuse, neglect, and fraud that happens in the United States — something the satirical comedy-thriller I Care A Lot explored in 2020, but from the point-of-view of the con. A fully-fledged business operation, the guardian targets vulnerable elders with lots of money, gets doctors to write that they can’t take care of themselves anymore, and gets a judge to give them control over their lives and assets — from which they pay themselves out of.
Dickey is utterly compelling as Ann. She can convey every emotion under the sun in her eyes alone, and then wipe her face blank, which is an exceptional talent. Ann is stoic but not completely emotionless, which enables us to empathise more with her plight. “My mother used to say if you let your anger out, you’ll live longer. She lived to be 102,” Ann says, demonstrating that anger shouldn’t be suppressed. Unfortunately, Hearne does not provide a backstory for Ann because the focus is on her later life. While some implications are made through her conversation with mysterious characters, it’s never enough to satiate our curiosity.
The G is remarkably well-crafted. Hearne’s filmmaking is polished and intentional, while the cinematography is lovely and rich, seamlessly balancing the contrasting warm indoors with the bright but bleak cold of the snowy winter. The first half hour of the film provides a great set-up, but the writing wanders into a mediocre story with a fairly boring mid-section, full of plot points that don’t raise the stakes high enough and ultimately drag out the pacing.
Billed as a revenge thriller, The G is surprisingly light on the revenge elements, with the film’s action kicking off in the final 10 minutes. Even then, it’s a fairly lacklustre event after the slow build it took to get there. The film’s DVD poster and promotional still, which feature Ann holding a gun, are also misleading because that doesn’t happen until there’s only six minutes left to spare. The screenplay would’ve benefited from allowing Dickey to showcase her badassery much earlier in the film, because that’s what we’re all waiting for. Even allowing a further peek into Ann’s past would’ve gone a long way. That said, The G is still plenty engaging, particularly when Dickey is on screen, proving that her star-power is more than bright enough for her to stand on her own.
The G is out on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK on August 19th, 2024.
