Portraits of Dangerous Women review – pleasant to… | Little White Lies

Por­traits of Dan­ger­ous Women review – pleas­ant to a fault

14 Oct 2024 / Released: 18 Oct 2024

Two adults standing in a field, one wearing a denim jacket and the other a yellow cardigan.
Two adults standing in a field, one wearing a denim jacket and the other a yellow cardigan.
3

Anticipation.

Female-focused Brit comedy with stalwart Tara Fitzgerald its centre. Well, okay then.

3

Enjoyment.

Nice chemistry, few good one-liners, no wheels reinvented.

3

In Retrospect.

Pleasant to a fault.

Fol­low­ing a bizarre road acci­dent, the lives of three strangers col­lide in this cheer­ful yet mean­der­ing dramedy.

Cama­raderie can come in many guis­es, and in Pas­cal Bergamin’s Home Coun­ties runaround, Por­traits of Dan­ger­ous Woman, it flour­ish­es as the result of an acci­den­tal dog killing and sub­se­quent hush-up wood­land bur­ial. This light, dry domes­tic com­e­dy of man­ners draws in an ensem­ble cast to tell of three slight­ly-lost souls who become entan­gled in the after­math of this gris­ly episode, giv­ing one anoth­er a per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al leg-up as their lives spi­ral out of control.

Jeany Spark’s Steph is a slight­ly daffy school teacher whose mar­riage is slid­ing off the rails (the intro­duc­tion of a cat into the domes­tic ecosys­tem only makes mat­ters worse). Then there’s Tara Fitzger­ald husky-toned school care­tak­er with a past”. Final­ly, there’s Yas­min Mon­et Prince’s Ash­ley, a young woman who’s yet to leave her mark on life, but in the process of con­sort­ing with cyn­i­cal local art deal­er Jon (Mark Lewis Jones), thinks she may have found her métier. 

The film has cheap and cheer­ful vibes, for­mal­ly stripped back to the core but pow­ered by some game per­for­mances and a script that’s light­ly pep­pered with some wry social obser­va­tion. It’s per­haps a lit­tle to pur­pose­ful­ly slight and mean­der­ing to real­ly leave its mark, but there’s enough inven­tion to make this feel like more than a Sun­day teatime TV spe­cial trans­posed to the big screen.

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