While the story of Joyce Vincent is deeply saddening, this film is comprised about 60% of interviews of people speculating what happened, 30% reconstruction of speculated moments and 10% of informative, engaging content if that. I am not the kind of person to be interested in speculation of an interesting story, particularly when those speculating are Vincent's work colleagues, and on and off boyfriends from DECADES AGO. ***SPOILER ABOUT HER VAGUE PERSONALITY, WHO KNEW?!*** So we discover that, while people got impressions of her they never really knew her, which you would expect of someone who was dead for three years before she was found. I lost count of the amount of times I heard them talk about how pretty and sexy she was. So much repetition with regards to interview content. It's just boring. Her family doesn't appear because they want to remain anonymous... and uninformative. You may be asking yourself "but surely- SURELY her family would have tried to contact her and find her?" and yeah, they all ask that too. Numerous times. "Was it a murder?" they wonder that too. SO MUCH SPECULATION. I started drifting off about half an hour in, by which point you pretty much get all the details you're going to get. You get all the facts in about the first five minutes. This documentary is more about the people around her, recalling vague memories, who aren't engaging enough to base a documentary on. It's just too long winded and opinionated and I don't have time for that.

OK, the subject matter is awful. Woman is so far gone from society that even her "friends" don't look for her when she dies and sits in her apartment for 3 years. The social commentary alone is hard and we should really look at ourselves.But, the movie itself is awful. The way it was filmed was just bad. I grew tired of listening to her so-called "friends" talk about how great she was. Yeah, that's why you went looking for her when you didn't hear from her for 3 years. Hope I never have friends like that. The film made it sound like this woman's family had nothing to do with her. When, in reality, they hired a PI to find her AND were at the inquest into her death. More than her "friends" did. The majority of the film focused on the actress playing Joyce and speculating on what she did. They should have included more of the medical examiner's report, forensics, the friends and why they let her down, and her family. Instead, I was left with more questions. I got more answers from a quick Google search. Just look up the story and read about it instead.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning Joyce Vincent's skeleton was found in her London bedsit three years after she died, surrounded by wrapped Christmas presents and with the TV still on in the background. Despite once having a fairly active social life, she clearly masked deep rooted insecurities to those around her, some of whom provide talking head perspectives here. These may have driven her to make some bad decisions and mix with the wrong people, drifting apart from those who really cared about her. Film maker Carol Morley attempts to piece together the events leading up to her death, trying to create a picture of who this woman was and how she came to meet such a lonely, desperate end.It's testament to what a crazy, twenty four hour news world we live in that Joyce Vincent's story, as mind blowing and heart breaking as it is, is the type of thing you could read about in some rag like The Sun and then just put to the back of your mind faster than Jack Robinson. But however much you think about it, the idea of a woman lying dead in her home for three years with not a single friend or family member coming round to check on her or noticing she was gone will always make you wonder what kind of world we're living in, especially with so much more to hand than in years gone by.As off putting as the thought of it is, the tone of the film should really be as dark and down beat as it can be, since it's such a desperately sad, shaming true life tale, but of course this would make it inaccessible to some, and it works more that Morley balances her work with more soulful, melancholy interludes in between the more dour, desperate moments. We learn of a confident, bubbly woman who could be the life and soul of any party, but who clearly carried deep, dark insecurities around with her and who failed to display much of a personality of her own, preferring to latch on to the close friends and people she had around her.With the limited amount of material she has to work with, new comer Zawe Ashton brings Joyce to life in as colourful and under stated a way as she can, always at her best in alone, private moments when her passion and talent as a singer really comes to life, only for nothing to come of this. As Robert De Niro once stated in a film of his, there's nothing sadder than wasted talent and while these are very wise words, the film shows how a vulnerable, insecure personality can inadvertently make this so.Morley has crafted a haunting, desperately sad tale that shows even in the 21st century we still live in more of an atomised, apart society than we'd care to admit and that maybe we don't care about each other as much as we ought to. ***

After reading the description of this film I looked forward to a well delivered film about the life and times of a woman who was eventually found dead in her apartment. Yes, the premise of finding out who she was and the life she had lived seemed like it would have provided an interesting journey for the viewers. Adding to the fact that not a single person had shown interest in her life when it ended and then not being found until 3 years later as a skeleton on a couch, the TV still running - made this seem like it may be interesting.However, I am disappointed to say that this film just doesn't have what a decent documentary needs. It contains barely any real evidence of the woman's life, and she is only seen in a few photographs at one point in the film. The story relies on some of her old acquaintances, who most obviously were not close friends with her. We are made to sit through endless assumptions and vague memories shot with a typical interview type backdrop throughout the entire film. Some of them just seem to just be there to get some screen time of their own and the film makers have been desperate enough to use basically anyone with any kind of connection to the victim. To make this 'documentary' a complete failure is the reliance on dramatization. It's a terrible attempt at story telling, the acting is poor and to tread even more dirt into this attempt at documentary making the film makers have recreated the woman's apartment, recreated the police crew packing up the apartment in full chemical suits.They also try to create a 'What if' scenarios by including a 'What if she was murdered?' theme to try and add more to it.The movie feels empty and poorly conceived. There is just not enough real footage and real evidence to even hold together 30 minutes let alone 1.5 hours.If you like your documentaries filled with acted dramatization, poor acting, film sets and montages created because they have no real footage of the events and a group of interviewees that were never close enough to the woman to help her in her times of need. Then this is your kind of movie.