Back to life

Origin and Year: Great Britain, 2019	Director: Chris Sweeney
Runnning time: 2 x 25 min

Daisy Haggard is a comedic actress who we could also see this year in the sarcastic comedy Breeders with Martin Freeman. Back to Life is her authorial “sadcom”, in which she plays the main character Miranda, returning home from prison after eighteen years. And because she wasn’t serving her sentence for any petty theft, they weren’t looking forward to her in her hometown. The series combines situational comicality, crazy and dark humor with an empathic tone of understanding for any development in life and in some places it manages to be a satire of small-town relationships. It can be assigned to a long line of today’s traumedies, comedies about traumatized heroines. And because Daisy Haggard is one of the comedians who likes to escalate things, Miranda’s trauma is due to a combination of absolutely tragic and absurdly funny events. The atmosphere of a peaceful British seaside town is here the scenery and another participant in one.