Alyssa McClelland trusts actors’ timing and gives barbed comedy room to work. We recommend Amandaland for its sharp performances, with a reservation about how well its wider ensemble hangs together.
Fi1m perspective
In Amandaland (2025), Lucy Punch makes a snob’s efforts to remain impressive painfully funny. Alyssa McClelland’s direction, alongside Simon Bird’s, keeps that performance at the centre. It is sharp, assured comedy that trusts its actors to carry it. We laughed hardest at Joanna Lumley’s cruelty; with the actors’ timing doing most of the work, the nastiness lands cleanly.
The web series One Step Closer to Home (2011) put McClelland on both sides of the camera, directing, co-writing and performing. She also wrote, directed and produced the short Second Best (2018). On Everything Now (2023), she directed the opening two episodes; on the fourth series of Sex Education (2023), she directed the last three. Those assignments involved establishing a programme’s tone and handling emotionally charged scenes within an existing one. That progression makes sense for a director drawn to comedy with some hurt in it.
In Amandaland, Matthew Wicks’s cinematography serves the exchanges rather than making a separate attraction of the images. Editors Gareth Heal, Lindsey Woodward, Gareth McEwen and Gavin Buckley keep the programme moving through plentiful jokes, even when a relationship feels underdeveloped. Oli Julian and Ethan Jeffrey provide the music, though the performers’ timing does most of the work. That is the right choice for a comedy whose chief pleasure is watching people struggle with one another.
The reservation concerns how well the wider ensemble works together. Amandaland is less sure of those relationships than it is of the individual comic performances, and brisk editing cannot entirely make up the difference. We would like to see McClelland give a whole group the same assurance she brings to a well-timed exchange, so that the connections between characters become as interesting as their separate efforts to impress. Start with Amandaland for Punch and Lumley, with some patience for the less convincing relationships around them.
Biography
Alyssa McClelland is an Australian director, screenwriter, producer and former actress. Born in Sydney in 1981, she studied Media Arts and Production at the University of Technology Sydney, majoring in directing, and trained at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York.
She directed all six episodes of the BBC comedy series Amandaland (2025), a spin-off of Motherland. McClelland has also directed episodes of the Netflix series Sex Education and was set-up director on Everything Now (2023).
Her short film Second Best (2018), which she wrote and directed, won the Australian Directors Guild Award for Best Direction in a Short Film as well as awards at Flickerfest, the Milan International Film Festival and the Sydney Film Festival.
