While Andrea Riseborough’s shock Oscar nomination for the SXSW 2022 sleeper To Leslie is still being processed, it’s too early to see whether it will have any effect on anything other than awards-season process. It would be nice, however, to think that it could also make it just that little bit harder for the success of smaller, more personal movies to be measured by box office returns alone (how many news stories made a point of deriding To Leslie’s $32,000 take?). Late Bloomers doesn’t have that film’s dramatic intensity, and is way more schematic in its plotting, but Lisa Steen’s debut feature is still an intimate, defiantly female-fronted indie, showcasing an engaging and refreshingly vanity-free performance from Karen Gillan, a talented Scottish actress whose career to date is still something of a work in progress.
Gillan plays Louise, a woman in her late 20s whose life is thrown into turmoil by a bad breakup. We meet her, alone and drunk, at a party at her ex’s old place, where she cynically projects her obvious fear of loneliness onto others, complaining that “adults are saaad.” Not as sad as Louise, however, whose friend has a showdown with her in the bathroom, calling her a “selfish brat” and telling her to “grow the f*ck up.” Louise is unperturbed and waves him off. “Take your white wine spritzer and fly away like all the rest,” she says waspishly, relishing a pretty good riposte while still sat on the toilet.
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