The relationship between poverty and loneliness is of a benign nature. Poverty teaches an individual to survive for oneself, to do everything in their power to get from one day to the next with little concern about the world itself. Inescapably, the individual acquires an indifference to the need to be with anyone else, to share the rhythm of life with another soul. Three films at this year’s London Film Festival dare to peek into a world of loneliness created by paucity.

Wendy and Lucy is the story of a girl from Indiana on her way to Alaska. Wendy (Michelle Williams) hopes to find a job in town where labour is needed. She also seems to want to run away. Her family don’t dislike her, but they are obviously not very keen to talk to her, as you never know when she might be asking for help. She travels with her dog Lucy, until their car breaks down in Oregon. To save money, she decides to steal some dog food and something for herself from a small shop on the outskirts of the town. This leads her to prison for the rest of the day, giving plenty of time for Lucy to disappear.

Kelly Reichardt constructs a close portrait of a woman who loses her only companion in life. Looking at Wendy throughout 90 minutes, we notice a candle slowly burning to extinction. As in Old Joy (2006), the director doesn’t impose on her leading character, but watches calmly, leaving us to understand what drives her protagonists into the desperate acts they commit. Wendy lives with hope for a better day, and the moment that hope is about to be shattered, she succumbs into a void, in which decisions to move foreward are meaningless. Her money is running away at every turn for pointless reasons, her friendship with her dog is slowly vanishing into the unknown.

There is no heroism or sentimentality in Reichardt’s films. She works with her actors as if they are strangers on a street, beggars hoping to be noticed, willing to be ignored. Michelle Williams’ quiet performance is effective through just that. Her Wendy is a passer-by that we notice, but we can’t approach. We look, we maybe judge, but we do not get involved. What we see is too serene, too un-dramatic at first glance, leading us to ignore the need to understand. And it is here were the film succeeds and we fail. The ordinary image, blank and shapeless, haunts us, for we are forced to see desperation deep inside us, rather than the idea of poverty we have in our collective imagination.

Nolberto Coria’s performance of his own life in Enrique Rivero’s first feature Parque vía is arguably a bit more nuanced in its rawness. He satisfies all our expectations of a poor caretaker in Mexico City. Beto is relying on a middle-aged danseuse to bring him milk every week when she comes for their regular sex fix. He eats junk food rarely, because it’s expensive, and yet he relishes on it when he does get it. He stays in the house for most of the day, watching routine news stories of murder and depression, and then he is careful at maintaining his home for the past thirty years of his life. The home does not belong to him, but a rich Señora (Tesalia Huerta, Rivero’s mother in a remarkable controlled performance). When she finally manages to sell the house, Beto is left with no job, no home, and no life.

The loneliness the protagonist has chosen for himself is deafening. The rare occasions he has to go out, are a dramatic feat. He closes his eyes with all his strength, refusing to see that beyond the space surrounded by the walls, he feels comfortable in, there is a world that breathes. No, life cannot exist in a place were he is not in charge, in a place where he might sense vulnerability.

The question that arises is what drives this existence consciously dedicated to solitude? Does Beto realise that his skills are too limited to rely on? Probably not. What is more apparent is that the house of his lifetime offers him a shelter from insecurity. The fear of losing might drive him to anything. He would rather save every penny then try and make a better day out of each day. For him loneliness represents a failure to connect with one self. Admitting it, his mirage of well-being will evaporate into thin air. He doesn’t see himself as poor because he chooses isolation as a means of escaping worldly loneliness, where one feels alone in the midst of a crowd, and is being despised for that by the same on-lookers. In his home, Beto cannot be despised, pitted, or loved. He is his own master and he can do anything, thus making the dénouement inevitable in its dark comedy.

Sandro Aguilar’s debut feature, Uprise, plays a more complex tune. A handful of characters live depleted days in a Portuguese town. They rarely communicate meaningfully with each other. They all try and make a living in jobs no-one seems interested in. Their relationships with their partners or relatives is understated in words and overstated in emotion. Watching their attempts at connecting with the outside world is painful through their failure.

Uprise gives us an unconnected puzzle constructed from pieces belonging to different portraits. The poverty the characters share among them is not so much expressed in the living conditions, as much as in the film’s ability to decompose the surroundings we are viewing. The feeling of loneliness appears like a ghost in a deserted town. Not even the cry of a premature baby can give hope for a more coherent vision of humanity as a vibrating organism. Aguilar’s failure is transposed through his bleakness, and scarcity of meaning. His mood lacks any dramatic element that can help the audience connect to the happenings in the film, despite the intriguing thought of a portrait being painted without any desire for meaning.

This emphasis on loneliness is disturbing in its exposition in modern cinema. Watching individuals from the developed world struggling to find means of existence, both economic and spiritual, and failing in consequence, is new for the audience in as much as the exposition is drawn with a palette that aims for seclusion into insignificance. There is no celebration of cause or individual heroism in the face of hardships, but only an acceptance of bleakness as a state of the world. If Wendy at least allows her dog the chance to have a better life, or Beto manages to direct his life towards an incarcerated ‘ideal’ he conceived for himself, then the people in Uprise prove that all these efforts are pointless when an individual has already acknowledged that one is alone.

The harrowing factor is that this kind of cinema is incapable at providing solutions for a better world. Members of the audience may connect to these characters, they may feel something agonising in their consciousness, they may even attempt an understanding of these individuals and the world they live in. However, the recurring mood will be one of fear. Fear of being poor, fear of being alone. The irony is that we are born with that fear, and just reinstating it, will not help us overcome it.