Ms Green and Other Lovely Beasts

The scouts

A post-mortem pet portraitist with an imaginary friend and a talking pug puppet — most scouts would've binned this in the pitch phase, but Barnes commits so fully to the premise's inherent weirdness that it becomes genuinely unsettling and hilarious in the same breath. The dark compulsion angle is the move that makes it; it refuses the easy cuteness and goes somewhere darker.

Barnes demonstrates formal control in how she manages tonal whiplash between the surreal and the intimate, threading an imaginary friend and taxidermy work into something that could've been precious but instead feels considered and composed. The film sits comfortably in a lineage of darkly comic character studies that take their own strangeness seriously.

The pug puppet could've been a gimmick, but the choice to make it feel genuinely present — not ironic, not undercut — while Elnora nurses an unrequited crush and her 'dark compulsions surface' is what locks the whole thing; it's the single tonal decision that allows a 15-minute film to hold three contradictory registers and make them land.

Reviews

Lucy Joan Barnes’s Ms Green and Other Lovely Beasts is a story that sells itself on the dark eccentricity of its protagonist, a post-mortem pet portraitist crushing on her business partner. Populated with murders and murderers, this creepy-cute comedy, written by Nick Thomson, shines in the light of