Free London Listings

Free, doors 7:30, screening 8:30

From the director of Old Joy comes this minimalist gem, a character study of Michelle Williams' Wendy - an impoverished vagrant who sleeps in her car while on her way to minimum wage work in Alaska - and her dog, Lucy. When she stops in a nondescript, weary town she encounters a run of bad luck, some of it brought about by her own bad decisions. Her car breaks down. She is arrested for shoplifting. Her dog goes missing.

Underneath this plain narrative surface is a lucid and melancholy inquiry into the current state of American society. Much as “Old Joy” turned a simple encounter between two longtime friends into a meditation on manhood and responsibility at a time of war and political confusion, so does “Wendy and Lucy” find, in one woman’s partly self-created hard luck, an intimation of more widespread hard times ahead.