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.

I remember learning about the discovery of Joyce Vincent's body a few years ago and thinking what a sad and disturbing news story it was, almost beggaring belief in present day civilised society. This superbly and sensitively crafted drama documentary from Carol Morley answers a mere handful of the many questions which inevitably followed while inevitably producing a myriad of others.It is a salutary reminder that life is both precious and mysterious, things are often not what they seem and how we all think we know our friends but in reality our comprehension is limited to what we are actually permitted to see and understand.The most refreshing and at the same time most disturbing impression given is that Joyce's friends appear to be genuine, caring people but despite this, she still slipped through the emotional and physical net which binds humanity together.The power of this film makes the loss almost as tangible to the audience as it must have felt to Martin. It reminds us that although time is often regarded as a great unhurried and invisible healer, it can also be corrosively destructive.Plenty to contemplate here...

The film's UK release date coincided with Christmas 2011, which was deliberate as the subject of the film, Joyce Carol Vincent, died from causes unknown shortly before Christmas 2003. Her body was not discovered until January 2007 when bailiffs acting on behalf of a housing association arrived at her flat with a repossession order as her rent had not been paid for 3 years. Questions were asked by her local MP, Lynne Featherstone (who appears in the film), as to how it was possible that her death had been unnoticed by anyone during the three-year period. The unusual and poignant nature of Joyce's demise led the film maker, Carol Morley, to begin investigating who Joyce had been and how she had been so abandoned in death. The film is the result of her efforts to piece together Joyce Carol Vincent.Not long before her death we learn that Joyce was hospitalised for a peptic ulcer; she listed her next-of-kin at the hospital as her bank manager describing him as the person who knew her best. Yet the film features people from her life - ex-boyfriends, flat mates, friends, ex-colleagues - that she could have called upon. Although it is easy to believe that the circumstances of her death and body's subsequent discovery were the fault of a society whose care for its members has unravelled Al, one of Joyce's ex-boyfriends, states in the film that Joyce had some responsibility for her demise by pulling away and isolating herself from those who knew and cared about her. Beneath the sociological comment the film offers is a more profound study in Joyce's character and the tragedy that befell her. Indeed it seems as though a combination of traumas in her life had led Joyce, a great keeper of secrets, to isolate herself completely.The film is an amazing production as the director, Morley, combines documentary style interviews, which flow naturally from the subjects, combined with a fictional account of Joyce's life informed by the interviews but fictionalised at other points. What is even more remarkable is that Morley painstakingly unearthed all the interviewees, pictures, film footage, sound recordings etc as none were available to the authorities in the aftermath of Joyce's death. The film also features Morley's montage of Joyce's time line from birth to death and what she discovers of events along the way. Interestingly Joyce's family did not want to be involved with the making of the film, wishing to remain anonymous. Amongst the many things that Joyce Carol Vincent did in her life was to meet Nelson Mandela and the film ends with actual footage of Mandela addressing a small musical gathering at which Joyce was present and we see her on film. She was an unusual person, possessed of talents most of which were never realised. As one interviewee remarks (her ex-boyfriend Al) she never seemed to have a future and did not seem fully invested in life. The title is a play on both Joyce sleepwalking through life as well as the dream imagined for the viewer of Joyce's life.Joyce sings during the film a song the refrain of which is 'my smile is a frown upside down'. She really reminds me of the man in Stevie Smith's poem 'Not Waving But Drowning', who "was much further out than you thought and not waving but drowning ... I was much too far out all my life ..."

I'm sure unnoticed deaths are far more common than we might assume. In this case, owing to the relative youth of the deceased and the length of time it took to discover her, there remain many unanswered questions. The young woman (38) was of Indian Asian/Grenadian extraction, having lost her mother at age 11 (when her mother was 41),and had been raised with 'aspirations' without having access to the routes that would accomplish what are likely to have been her parents' expectations. It's a very sad tale, sadder that her oldest friend was clearly still carrying a light for her. So, there she was, never really fitting in, not prepared to enter the 'black ghetto', not really being part of the Asian community and living on the margins of the white world - amongst all the other misfits. I suspect there was much that she did not understand and much that she would not know how to deal with as a result. She evidently tried to create an image that would act as a thin ediface of self-esteem whilst she tried to navigate her way through life. So sad that this may have undermined her health and brought about an untimely and unnoticed end. Full marks to Carol Morley in piecing the evidence together although this film doesn't quite keep your attention all through. Oddly, I was tempted to close my eyes a couple of times and would have dozed off if it had been on TV - quite ironic really!