The G (2023): lean, realist revenge thriller puts a welcome spotlight on Dale Dickey (Review)

The concept of “geriaction” has been around for a fair while, although not long enough for people to give it a better name. Younger audiences born around the time Liam Neeson made his first Taken movie in 2008 might be forgiven for assuming older leads are just a thing action movies always have, in the same way that rom-coms tend to be led by young attractive people and superheroes tend to be played by men called Chris. Certainly it’s hard to remember that Neeson was once considered an unconventional lead for an action film, or that the first John Wick – the most influential action movie to come afterwards – was expected to be “Keanu Reeves’s Taken“. Karl R. Hearne’s The G, now released in UK cinemas by Lightbulb Films, is nothing like John Wick but it has the same guiding light. By allowing its lead actor, rather than genre rules, to dictate the tone and narrative, it finds new things to do with the traditional revenge-thriller template.

And The G is definitely a thriller, rather than an action movie. It opens on a scene that recalls Blood Simple, as two criminals who’ve just buried some evidence are surprised when said ‘evidence’ starts breathing. This kind of terse, nasty small-town noir used to be an effective calling card for directors – The G is Hearne’s second film, after 2017’s Touched – but it has, perhaps, suffered from television annexing this territory in shows like Ozark and every odd-numbered season of True Detective. Rose Glass recently made a well-received stab at bringing it back with Love Lies Bleeding, and there are certain parts of the genre – black humour, most notably, as well as memorably weird bit-parts – that Glass does better than Hearne. Equally, there are some areas where The G has the advantage.

The most obvious one is verisimilitude, and this is where The G is very attentive to its star’s strengths. The star in question is Dale Dickey, who made her screen debut in 1994 but wasn’t given a lead role until 2022’s A Love Story. Interviewed about that film, she explained her long road to fame by saying that in college productions she was usually cast as either characters under twelve or characters over fifty. I can’t speak to her skill at the former age group, but she’s definitely got a gift for the latter. Dickey’s particular brilliance lies in playing characters who’ve been through hard times, and who’ve become harder in response. It’s a quality that’s served her well in everything from My Name is Earl to Breaking Bad via Iron Man 3, but it received its best showcase – until now – when she played the wife of the local meth dealer opposite a then-unknown Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone.

Again, comparing The G to Winter’s Bone shows how carefully Hearne has tilted the axis of his film. Winter’s Bone plays out as a social realist film, even when people are chainsawing the hands off a corpse. The G comes across as a hard-boiled crime thriller from its title down. Yet that title actually comes from the nickname given to Dickey’s character by her granddaughter (played very well by Romane Denis). The film keeps shifting between these different registers, the bloody crime thriller and the downbeat family drama, and it does so very effectively. It establishes Dickey’s Ann as someone you don’t cross, but it refuses to rush her into violence. Springing into action at the first sign of trouble is something movie action heroes do, and Ann is more convincing, more textured than that.

When that time comes, it’s incredibly cathartic, not least because Hearne uses a very real, deeply reprehensible crime at the centre of the film’s crime plot. A British audience may be aware of the phenomenon of legal guardianship fraud from J. Blakeson’s black comedy I Care a Lot, in which Rosamund Pike’s psychopathic anti-hero engages in it. Essentially, it’s a scam where people register themselves as legal guardians of elderly people in order to send them into care homes, at which point the victims’ assets are transferred to their abuser. It’s a loathsome scam, and it was satisfying enough watching these people get their comeuppance in the cartoonier world of Blakeson’s film. Watching one of their victims get revenge on them is even more cathartic still – particularly at the hands of someone as real, as credible, as Dickey.

The film does, as I noted, keep you waiting for that point, although you’re never in doubt that it’ll come. That’s one genre expectation Hearne hasn’t subverted: the film might be unwatchably depressing without that implicit promise of revenge. Hearne keeps the mid-section of the film busy with a number of things, including a surprisingly effective romance subplot and a little more focus on Denis’s Emma. Not all of it works as well as its central performance, and Hearne isn’t yet much of a visual director. (You don’t want a low-key crime story like this to be all flash, but the live burial at the start is the only image that makes a strong impression) But he’s already a fine actor’s director, and he has a real sense for the burned-out, hopeless feel of de-industrialised towns. He might be someone to keep an eye on; his lead already is.

Graham’s Archive – The G (2023)