It’s hard to believe that ANON is Dylan Brady’s directorial debut. An intense, deeply unsettling short psychological thriller that explores the relationship between desire, identity and the privilege of being able to live authentically, the film is a remarkably assured first effort from the actor and screenwriter, who spent four years trying to bring the project to life before eventually financing much of it himself.
Shot entirely using dash cams in Brady’s hometown of Derby, ANON stars Con O’Neill as a closeted taxi driver whose seemingly uneventful Friday night shift takes a disturbing turn following an encounter with a young male passenger. What follows is a tense, increasingly uncomfortable exploration of two people whose experiences of their sexuality could hardly be more different, one that constantly plays with audience expectations while refusing to provide any easy answers. O’Neill is phenomenal in the role, delivering a complex, deeply affecting performance that makes his character as fascinating as he is difficult to pin down.
When Film Updates first spoke to Brady in 2024, he was preparing to make ANON, having already established himself as an exciting emerging talent both in front of and behind the camera, with acting roles in shows such as Mary & George and The Diplomat, as well as a writing credit on Netflix’s Everything Now. At the time, he spoke about his frustration with the increasingly safe and aspirational nature of queer storytelling, expressing a desire to make something more interrogative, something that reflected the complexities of his own experiences growing up.
Two years later, ANON is finally making its way to audiences, premiering at the 2026 Aesthetica Short Film Festival, and Brady has only become more convinced of the importance of making work that challenges audiences rather than reassuring them.
“I think I wanted to challenge a few things,” he says when asked whether his perspective on queer storytelling has changed since our previous conversation. “First of all, I hadn’t seen anything about where I’m from. I hadn’t seen anything about Derby. I’d never seen stories told there.”
Brady points to the work of filmmakers such as Shane Meadows as an example of the kinds of stories typically afforded to working-class communities outside major metropolitan centers. “What we’re often afforded is social realism and things that feel really observational and pedestrian, and that’s beautiful. I think that’s amazing. But to have a genre ambition and do it in Derby just felt like, yeah, I’ve not seen that. That’s really fun.”
For Brady, however, the desire to make ANON went far beyond wanting to bring genre filmmaking to his hometown. The film was also an opportunity to interrogate how queer characters are depicted on screen, particularly those whose experiences and identities don’t necessarily conform to what audiences have come to expect from contemporary queer cinema.
The inspiration for ANON was deeply personal. Brady reveals that the film is semi-autobiographical, drawing from an experience he had when he was younger, one that he initially found amusing but which took on a very different meaning when he began considering it from the perspective of the other person involved.
“It’s a version of something that happened to me when I was young,” he reveals. “It was truly the reactions of other people when I would tell the story in the pub and I’d be laughing, and they would be like, ‘Oh God, that’s so awful.’ And I was like, ‘Is it? I don’t know. I don’t feel awful. I feel okay.'”
That discrepancy between his own feelings about the experience and the reactions of those around him prompted Brady to reconsider the encounter, particularly the imbalance between two people who may have shared the same experience but were not necessarily afforded the same opportunities afterward.
“I feel okay because I was very young, and I was in my small conservative hometown and I knew I was going to leave. I was going to not feel trapped by that place, and I wouldn’t be defined by that place,” he explains. “I felt like I had access to this currency that maybe the man that I shared that experience with did not.”
It’s a particularly fascinating way of approaching the relationship between sexuality and identity, especially through the perspective of an older man who experiences same-sex desire but may not have the freedom, or even the language, to identify with queerness in the same way that younger generations might. ANON doesn’t attempt to resolve those contradictions or explain away its protagonist’s behavior. Instead, it asks audiences to consider how differently two people can experience the same encounter, and how factors such as age, geography and social circumstances can fundamentally change what that encounter means to each of them.
Brady says he has also noticed a growing willingness among other filmmakers to explore similarly uncomfortable territory, pointing to his friend and fellow filmmaker Rhys Marc Jones, whose feature directorial debut Black Church Bay recently premiered at the London Film Festival. Starring Tom Cullen and Joe Locke, the mystery thriller similarly explores the consequences of a same-sex encounter, albeit through a very different narrative.
“It’s such an excellent, excellent movie,” Brady says. “He’s a good friend and a support and a mentor of mine in lots of ways, and I guess we share an attitude and sensibility. I think that’s evident in the way that he’s made that film. It’s genre-forward, it’s morally complex, it offers no easy answers.”
“I’m really happy that people like Rhys are contributing to that in the culture because I think it’s important. I think it’s important that queer characters and characters from different parts of the world are able to be just as complicated and murky and interesting as everyone else.”
Getting ANON made, however, was anything but easy. Despite spending several years attempting to secure financing, Brady struggled to find anyone willing to fund the project, eventually deciding to take matters into his own hands.
“It was a real uphill struggle to get this film made. No one would give us any money to make it, and when you watch it, maybe you can understand why, because it’s difficult,” he admits. “A bit of crowdfunding got us a tiny bit, but largely I had to save up the cash to do it from being an actor, and when I could finally pay for the film, I did.”
That lack of financing also proved instrumental in shaping the film’s distinctive visual identity. While Brady had always intended to incorporate dashcam footage into ANON, the decision to shoot the entire film using the devices came much later in development, initially as a practical solution to the budgetary constraints the production was facing.
“Dash cams were always a feature,” he explains. “We wanted to have a feeling of voyeurism and realism that would elevate that sense of danger and make us feel sort of complicit.”
Originally, Brady envisioned using the footage as a misdirection, leading audiences to believe that O’Neill’s character may be preying on the unsuspecting passengers who enter his taxi. “We sort of wanted Anon to have these dash cams in his car and for us to observe the passengers in his taxi through these dash cams, and for that to feel like it was leading us towards a revelation of some kind, that he was preying on these passengers, that he was a predator.”
The film quickly subverts those expectations, however, with Brady emphasizing that establishing Anon as something other than the predator audiences may initially suspect him to be was particularly important to the story he wanted to tell.
When financing fell through, Brady and his collaborators began considering whether they could shoot the entire film using dash cams instead, eventually discovering that doing so would reduce the production costs to roughly a third of what they would have otherwise been.
It was an ingenious solution, but one that also presented a series of unexpected technical challenges.
“The dash cams we were using run in 60-second clips or 10-second clips, and so we had to reprogram them to run for 10 minutes,” he recalls. “Every time you knock the dash cam at all, they start rolling, and so it was quite a technical feat. It was quite a challenge, and my wonderful DP, Michael Filocamo, really took it in his stride.”
Despite the limitations of the technology, ANON manages to feel remarkably cinematic, with Brady and Filocamo finding ways to use the dashcam footage to communicate their protagonist’s increasingly complicated psychological state. The result is an unnerving, almost voyeuristic experience that frequently places audiences in the uncomfortable position of observing something they perhaps shouldn’t be witnessing.
“We did always want it to feel psychologically motivated as well,” Brady explains. “It wasn’t just found footage. We didn’t want it to just be a voyeuristic documentary of what’s happening in the cab. We wanted to take that visual language and elevate it and put us inside Anon’s mind, which I hope we managed to achieve. I think we managed to pull off some moments that do feel like cinema, albeit differently.”
Brady says Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown was one of the films he watched while preparing for ANON, although his visual references largely came from photography rather than other films, given the unconventional nature of the production.
“We were working in a slightly unconventional way, so it was about how we achieve this aesthetic, how we create moments of cinematic elevation in this slightly more lo-fi format, looking at how lighting works on these cameras,” he explains. “I was working more instinctively with the actors than maybe I would have if I was directing in a more conventional way.”
At the heart of the film is Con O’Neill, who delivers a magnetic performance as Anon, a character whose internal struggles are often far more complicated than his outward behavior might initially suggest. O’Neill has long been one of the most versatile character actors working today, with memorable performances in everything from Happy Valley and Chernobyl to Our Flag Means Death and The Penguin, and ANON gives him another opportunity to explore a deeply troubled, morally ambiguous character.
Brady says O’Neill was always his first choice for the role, drawn to the actor’s ability to communicate vulnerability while maintaining a certain degree of mystery.
“I’m just such a fan of Con. I’ve grown up watching him, which I’m sure he’ll hate me saying, but I just love him so much,” Brady says. “There’s something about Con that makes you lean in. There’s something incredibly vulnerable about him, but also something that leaves a question mark, and I want to know more. I think he’s got such versatility as an actor, and I really knew that he could carry all of that complexity that we wanted to find in Anon really quickly.”
Getting O’Neill on board proved surprisingly straightforward, despite Brady initially being warned that securing the actor might be something of a long shot.
“When I was speaking to Nathan Toth, who cast this, you sort of send your lists of actors, and I put Con at the top. Nathan called me and he was like, ‘Just to manage your expectations, Con O’Neill says no to everything.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, okay, we’re going to try.’ But thankfully it resonated with him and he jumped on board pretty much straight away.”
“He was a wonderful collaborator and a great person to have on the team, and I think he did a smashing job,” he adds.
One person who proved particularly instrumental in helping Brady navigate the filmmaking process was Andrew Haigh, the acclaimed filmmaker behind Weekend, 45 Years and All of Us Strangers, who has served as a mentor to Brady since his participation in the BFI Flare x BAFTA mentorship programme.
Brady reveals that Haigh gave him a deceptively simple piece of advice shortly before production began, one that would go on to influence everything from the casting process to the way he worked with his actors on set.
“Andrew gave me one of the best pieces of advice,” he recalls. “We had a coffee just before I went through this, and he gave me such a brilliant piece of advice which was helpful through casting, through production and even in the edit. It was really simple. He just said, ‘Go with your actors.'”
As an actor himself, Brady was already familiar with the frustration of working with directors whose approaches might clash with his own instincts, but Haigh’s advice encouraged him to reconsider the ways in which those relationships could function.
“You will always have a better time and you will extract better work and deliver more accuracy and more detail if you don’t fight your actors’ instincts,” he explains. “Sometimes I’d be watching tapes or auditions in the room and there’d be a really brilliant actor who just had different instincts to what my idea was or what the film required. I’d quite often get carried away working with these actors in the room and be quite excited about, ‘Oh, we could do this and we could do that.’ But ultimately it came back to who was serving the story and who had those correct instincts, who I was aligned with on an instinctual level.”
“Rather than trying to bend their offers and choices out of shape, you can just lean in,” he continues. “I think we really did that. Everybody working on this film had a shared vision about what it was that we were trying to do.”
Looking back at some of his own experiences as an actor, Brady says the advice also helped him understand why certain collaborations had been considerably more difficult than others. “It made me realize why I’d had terrible times sometimes working with directors, why it felt sticky and difficult, and it’s because often it’s a clash of instincts. That’s where you get directors giving you a line reading and you’re like, ‘I’m going to die.'”
While ANON marks Brady’s first foray into directing, filmmaking was not necessarily something he had always envisioned for himself. Having initially pursued acting without any clear idea of how to turn his interest into a career, he says his transition into writing and eventually directing happened gradually, almost by accident.
“I feel like you should say yes, right? It feels like the kind of thing where you’re like, ‘Yeah, I always knew that I wanted to be a storyteller,’ and whatnot. But I guess I just didn’t have the language, so no,” he admits when asked whether writing and directing had always been part of his ambitions. “I didn’t even really know that I could do acting. I just knew that it was something that I enjoyed, let alone having the language to see a path for myself into making films and writing.”
Brady recalls being somewhat baffled by his fellow drama school students who were already attempting to write their own material. “When everyone was spending their free periods focusing on their writing, I’d be like, ‘What the fuck are you writing about when you’re 19? What have you got to say about the world?'”
He eventually began writing around the time he graduated from drama school, with the pandemic providing an unexpected opportunity to dedicate more time to developing his own projects. Directing followed soon after, encouraged by a realization that he didn’t necessarily need to wait for someone else to give him permission to pursue it.
“I realized very quickly working in the industry that the only difference between people who wanted to make films and people who made films was that the people who made the films had the audacity to do so,” he explains. “It was totally okay to try and take up that space and contribute to that. So it’s been a slow realization, and now I’m like, I want to do it all.”
It’s an ambition that Brady is already making considerable progress toward fulfilling. Earlier this year, his original erotic thriller project sparked a bidding war before being acquired by A24, with Nicole Kidman subsequently becoming attached to the project.
The currently untitled series follows a struggling actor who takes a job working as a nanny for a powerful producer and her movie-star husband, hoping to exploit their connections to advance his own career before becoming entangled in a far more dangerous game. Much like ANON, the project sees Brady drawn toward the darker, more uncomfortable aspects of desire, although this time on a considerably larger scale.
“I’m just having the best time,” he says when asked about the project. “It’s been a mental year. This is a project which I wrote a couple of years ago now, and I’ve been trying to shepherd through. It had a life and then sort of felt like it was coming to an end, and then suddenly this crazy thing happened. I’m very grateful.”
Brady confirms that Kidman is attached and will also produce the project, while teasing another casting development that has yet to be announced.
“We’ve got the incredible and formidable Nicole Kidman attached, and she’s producing with us,” he reveals. “There’s another piece of casting which I probably can’t say yet, but I’m very, very excited.”
With two scripts already written, Brady says the team is preparing to take the project back out to market in the new year, hoping to find its next home.
“We’ve got two great scripts. Two scripts I’m really proud of that we’ve all worked really hard on. We’ve got a package that we’re really happy with, and we’re going to be taking it back out to market in the new year. So more on that, and where we’re landing and what the new home will be soon.”
And while Brady is understandably excited about what the future might hold, his focus for now is on ANON, a remarkable achievement in its own right.
Dark, provocative and frequently uncomfortable to watch, it’s the kind of daring, transgressive filmmaking that we rarely get to see these days, particularly when it comes to queer cinema, where characters are so often expected to be sympathetic, their experiences affirming and their stories neatly resolved. Brady makes no such concessions, delivering a bold, deeply unsettling film that refuses to shy away from the more complicated and uncomfortable aspects of the queer experience. It’s an extraordinary directorial debut, one that makes the prospect of whatever Brady chooses to tackle next all the more exciting.
ANON premieres at the 2026 Aesthetica Short Film Festival, running from November 4 to 8 in York.
