The phrase character actor feels slightly like a derogatory term applied to those who work onscreen and don’t tend to be cast in the leads in mainstream films. Besides the pejorative whiff the phrase carries, you can pretty much guarantee that those actors who have forged a career of any duration have done so through talent. One such person is the great Dale Dickey, a familiar face across TV and film for three decades. From My Name is Earl, Breaking Bad, and Justified, to The Pledge, The Changeling, and a celebrated, terrifying turn in Winter’s Bone, she’s known for playing tough, often criminal characters from the wrongest of the wrong side of the tracks. Yet we recently got to see a softer side to Dickey as she anchored Max Walker-Silverman‘s gentle, tender A Love Song, and she stuns in another lead role, finding nuance and resilience in Karl R. Hearne‘s frigid, politically-charged neo-noir The G.

Ann (Dickey) is a formidable woman with a shady past who is happy to exist on the periphery of society in her small town. So chilly is her personality that you could imagine that the snowy pavements and icy streets were her doing, like some hardscrabble version of Narnia’s White Witch. But when she loves she loves fiercely, and that love is bestowed on her ill husband Chip and her pugnacious granddaughter Emma (Romane Denis) who aspires to be like her nails-hard gran, whom she calls ‘the G’. Ann and Chip fall victim to Rivera (Bruce Ramsay), a crooked legal guardian, and are forced into a residential facility as Rivera tries to force them to reveal the location of a stash of money he believes Ann has hidden. Brave Emma puts herself in harm’s way trying to get her gran out, but Ann has already begun the process, calling in her lifelong Texan mob connections. She’s also no slouch in the violence department herself.

Writer and director Karl R. Hearne melded his memories of his forceful grandmother with real stories of the elderly falling foul of a guardianship system that is hideously open to abuse to create Ann, whom Dickey brings to vivid life. ‘I’m not a good person,’ she confides to a fellow ‘resident’ of the geriatric Gulag, but she is an utterly compelling one. And The G is as much a character study as it is a thriller and Hearne aims for an authenticity that matches his protagonist. Ann is a redoubtable presence, dangerous even, but she’s still an elderly woman against a system that’s monolithically rotten and enforced by ruthless gangsters. Her limitations – and her acknowledgement of such – are as fundamental to the character as her undeniable talents.  Similarly, Ann’s world is run as much by the threat of violence as much as its application. When there are bloody flashpoints, they’re swift, sudden, and conclusive. If there’s one part that feels a little bit out of step is in the undiluted evil of Ramsay’s Rivera. He plays it to the hilt, but he’s a conspicuously broad outlier.

But everything else feels bluntly plausible. In this country, viewers may be familiar with this cruel vagary of the US medical system through scabrous satire I Care a Lot which tackled the subject from the perspective of Rosamund Pike‘s corrupt legal guardian. Seen from the other side, with the additional class divide starkly highlighted, it’s brutal. It’s fury is palpable – with Ann its blazing personification – but it stops short of being polemical. The situation is an organic part of the plot, and the class commentary adds a further few degrees of heat to its simmering atmosphere.

Despite all this, The G isn’t a bleak experience. Hearne isn’t afraid to puncture the tension with bouts of gallows humour and there are several memorable images that straddle the divide between comic and disturbing such as a man being buried alive offered the last few puffs of a cigarette before his face is covered for good. It’s absurd enough to raise a smile even as you cringe at such a horrific fate. Dickey channels this modus operandi perfectly. Rarely do actor and character feel so intrinsic (although David Krumholtz‘s Lousy Carter, also at GFF this year, is another example). There’s a sense of Dickey acknowledging and playing with the confines of her own persona, finding jazzy riffs with which to round out Ann as a character in her own right. All of the cast are great – Romane Denis is an especially fine foil – but this is undoubtedly Dickie’s film.

Screening as part of Glasgow Film Festival 2024 on Thu 29 Feb and Sat 2 Mar 2024