Lee Knight | A Friend of Dorothy / 2025

inheritance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lee Knight (screenwriter and director) A Friend of Dorothy / 2025 [21 minutes]

 

Lee Knight’s short A Friend of Dorothy is a charming, if rather predictable, comedy about the meet-up of youth and old age, vaguely similar—although without any of its dark, unpredictable oddities—to Hal Ashby’s 1971 comedy, Harold and Maude.

     What the IMDb scenario doesn’t make clear is that this film, although basically a sweet eccentric British comedy, has the potential to be something far more raucous, particularly given the fact that the central figure, Dorothy, an 87-year old widow devoted to theater, is played by the vivacious and funny, potty-mouthed Mariam Margolyes, who played in dozens of significant character roles before she became famous through her portrayal of Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter series and through her appearances on the Graham Norton Show, where she has made her lesbian identity quite clear. Her lawyer Dickie is played by actor, writer, and TV and internet host Stephen Fry, an openly gay actor.

    Moreover, the young teenager with whom Dorothy makes friends, a 17-year old black teen named JJ (Alistair Nwachukwu) is apparently gay, who when he discovers her drama library, pulls down Martin Sherman’s play Bent, a work about gay men in a Nazi Concentration camp—this despite the fact that he has never even heard of the work Dorothy first mentions, The Wizard of Oz, let alone heard of Judy Garland. Discovering that despite his parent’s desires that he play football—the soccer ball he was kicking having accidently gone astray in Dorothy’s backyard, the reason for his visit—that he really would like to be an actor, she pulls down the play The Inheritance, Matthew López’s 2018 work inspired by E.M. Forster’s Howards End about three generations of New York gay men after the AIDS epidemic, to have him audition for her.

    His reading is so moving, in fact, that she encourages further visits, and the two become fast friends, he shopping for her and pulling off the lid her prune cans, she sharing her knowledge of theater, and both of them actually caring for one another in a manner that neither of them have previously experienced.

     We learn little of JJ’s family, but we do discover that Dorothy’s son has moved to “the other side of the world,” leaving her only a distant, self-serving, and dismissive grandson Scott (Oscar Lloyd) who visits her on occasion mostly just to check in on the condition of the house, which he hopes will be left to him or his father, and to encourage her to seek out an assisted living space. Smug and fatuous, he clearly has no true interest of even love for his dotty auntie.

    The work is too short to fully develop the relationship between her and JJ, but we sense that in the few weeks of their friendship, something in both their lives has changed, making them more alive and richer for the experience, suggesting that while he helps and listens to her, she offers him the kind of cultural inheritance very much at the center of López’s play—and incidentally the kind of quick introduction to culture that the “raconteur’s” rent boys offered to Jim in Steve McLean’s Postcards from London which I saw, by coincidence just a day earlier, and which was released the same year as López’s play.

     The last scene takes place at the lawyer Dickie’s office, as Scott suddenly finds himself at the same table with JJ where Dickie is about to read his grandmother’s will. Scott’s selfish nature immediately raises his ruff, leading him to wonder why a black man who he sees as simply a visitor of an aunt who, as he puts it, “has lost her marbles” is sitting at the same table. Dickie, however, strongly argues that his client most certainly had all her wits about her when she changed her will.

    We suspect, of course, that she has left everything to JJ. But Dorothy is far wiser that that, knowing that if she had done so Scott and his father would simply have drowned the innocent young boy in a lawsuit. She leaves the house to her son, and wills her nephew 50,000 pounds.

     But She leaves her entire library to JJ. Satisfied with the endowment, Scott hurries off, delighted to give up the dusty books to her auntie’s so-called “friend,” his fears allayed. After he leaves, Dickie hands him one particular book, The Inheritance, in which JJ later finds a note from Dorothy suggesting he pursue his dream of acting, with a check lying beneath it for ₤50,000. The beautiful last photo of JJ looking off into his future ends this lovely fairytale.

     This film was nominated for the short film category of 2026 Academy Awards.

*I might also suggest that Scott reads somewhat as a nasty gay man, wearing a pink tie early in the film, and declaring, after a phone call demanding he hurry to a meeting, “Well, fuck me up the bum.” Yet he is likely to marry a woman simply to please his business partners. And, obviously, we could not even imagine that JJ might be a closeted gay boy

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).