Five years in the making, riveting to watch and revealing to ponder long after it ends, Carol Morley's film is a documentary about a bizarre news story and an obsession. The news story in a 2006 tabloid reported the discovery of a dead woman, Joyce Vincent, aged 38, whose decomposed body was found in a flat above a north London shopping centre. She had died three years earlier surrounded by Christmas shopping; the heating and the TV set were still on. No one had reported her death. The obsession is Carol Morley's. She became fascinated with Joyce's identity, why no one had inquired about her, and what sort of society could have allowed such neglect.
So she tracked down friends, acquaintances, family members and other parties, but steered clear of sociologists, and compiled the movie from talking head interviews and dramatised episodes, largely silent, featuring Zawe Ashton as the grown-up Joyce and Alix Luka-Cain as the schoolgirl. She was born in Hammersmith in 1965, her mother a carefully brought-up Indian, her father a womanising black man, both from the Caribbean. Attractive, vivacious, professionally ambitious, Joyce was secretive, presented a different face to different people, and seemed unable to commit herself. There are clues everywhere, but the evidence from the witnesses (including lovers) is contradictory, and there are gaps that can't be filled. It's a fascinating film, skilfully assembled, and one is inevitably reminded of Citizen Kane and Rashomon, though the films I most thought of were British, both murder stories: The Woman in Question (1950) and Sapphire (1959).