It is not unheard of for a person to die, alone, and not be found for a few weeks at a time but..3 years is almost hard to believe, let alone fathom. At that point you have to question the electric company, building owner, neighbors, etc. What went so wrong in the last days of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman not yet 40? A skeleton surrounded by neatly wrapped Christmas presents with a television on, illuminating death and keeping her remains company.

To some degree you want to ask the people interviewed in this documentary, friends from over the years, how could she be dead for so long without anyone knowing but it is a bit silly to put any…

I first heard about the docu-film Dreams Of A Life on BBC1's Film 2011. The review instantly caught my attention at first because the recreations starred Zawe Ashton, the beautiful and stylish young actress from Channel 4's Fresh Meat, but then it hooked me in with the story; a true story about Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman whose body lay undiscovered in her bedsit for three year. I was immediately fascinated as to how such a tragedy could be allowed to occur. Sadly because my local cinema is shite, I didn't get to see the film until this week when it received its premiere on Channel 4. Now, having seen it, I know that it is a film that will…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand".

One of the best documentaries of 2012 was, alas, also one of the most sorely underseen; Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life is a film every bit as extraordinary and unbelievable as the tale it tells, that of vibrant young Londoner Joyce Vincent, whose decomposed body lay undiscovered in her home for three years after her death. There’s a raw, searing passion to Morley’s work as she—possessed by the need to tell this woman’s story—interviews Joyce’s friends and attempts to piece together this fragmented puzzle and discover how anyone could disappear from the world so unnoticed. It’s a film of almost uncomfortable power, the impassioned anger it inspires just as affecting…

I remember reading about this documentary upon its theatrical release and for days afterwards I was unable to shake the story about how a dead woman’s body lay unnoticed for three years in a London bedsit. Journalists like to throw around phrases like ‘Broken Britain’ and the demise of society but you can’t quite comprehend how somebody could slip through the cracks in the way Joyce Vincent had.

Dreams of a Life attempts to piece together Joyce’s life via the people that knew her but over the course of ninety minutes you realise what a contradictory and elusive figure she really was. In truth it is the idea behind the documentary that is so haunting and thought provoking rather than…

OH GOD THIS IS SO SAD. Predictably enough given the subject matter: it's an attempt to reconstruct the life of Joyce Vincent, the woman who was found dead in Wood Green after being left undiscovered for three years (with the television on and surrounded by wrapped Christmas presents, which are particularly creepy details).

It's bound to be unsatisfying given that no-one knows exactly what happened (at least no-one willing to talk about it), but by acknowledging it's a partial picture it ends up an interesting reflection on identity and how we can barely know people who've been in our lives for years. Somehow this apparently gregarious would-be singer ended up completely disconnected from friends and family, doing casual cleaning work…

An amazing tale and a deeply haunting movie, though I'm slightly ambivalent on Joyce Vincent - who died alone in her apartment, aged 38, and was only discovered 3 years later, sitting on the couch with the TV still on - being played by a lookalike actress in dramatic reconstructions (incl. one instance that's clearly conjecture, unsupported by anything anyone says). It'd be one thing if these were red herrings (like the equivalent strategy in The Imposter), used to reinforce the basic message that "You don't really know people", but Morley seems to think she's giving Joyce life with this strategy whereas it's closer to the opposite: In a way, her absence as a person is all she has left…