'I thought my friends being wary was a reflection on me

Filmmaker Alanna Francis tells Zoé Beaty why she decided to make a film that explores the impact of emotional abuse not just on the victim but on the people who care about them

- Zoé Beaty

To begin with, Alanna Francis didn’t understand why her friends didn’t like her new boyfriend. To her, it had been a flurry of love – they had met in New York and fallen for each other quickly, moving in together in a matter of weeks. Francis, who was in her twenties, had been overcoming another heartbreak at the time, but now there was someone there, “telling me how wonderful I was, how interested in me he was”.

“Right away it was intense,” she explains, but then, she was intensely happy. Intensely loved. “I didn’t notice it was happening at all.”

The signs that she was being psychologically abused were subtle, almost completely hidden – until they weren’t. For a long time, she simply internalised the warnings. Her friends’ instant wariness of her new relationship “was a reflection on me”, she thought, “that I’d chosen someone ‘wrong’. Then he wanted to know where I was all the time; he was checking my emails. Things started to get worse and worse – he was becoming controlling.”

Bit by bit Francis, started to withdraw. She was no longer able to talk to her close group of girl friends; she saw them less and less. It wasn’t long before she found herself completely isolated, as her friends were left worried about what to do. Her experience inspired her acclaimed film Alice, Darling, which was released in 2022, starring Anna Kendrick. The film was praised by viewers as a sharp, pertinent example of the very internal experience of coercive control and its insidious nature.

The psychological thriller sees Alice’s distress slowly unfold as her boyfriend, Simon, pushes her to breaking point. On the surface, their relationship could be mistaken for loving – his constant “concern” for her whereabouts; physically draping himself over her in public; his reminders that “No one loves you the way I do.”