The Misfortunes of a Spy and Her Mystic - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

​​The Misfortunes of a Spy and Her Mystic feels like it has wandered in from the golden age of the indie film festival. There’s something wonderfully 90s/2000s Sundance about its queer-coded mix of mystery, sexuality, spirituality and ethical murkiness, the kind of strange little film that might have picked up a cult following through word of mouth and then lived forever on DVD. Eve, a woman working on the fringes of the mental health system, finds herself drawn into the orbit of her mysterious new client Meda, played with an alluring unpredictability by Joy Donze.As Eve’s role as advocate starts to blur into something closer to spy, the play becomes a sexy, slippery game of shifting loyalties and competing versions of reality.

There are shades of Bound in the way the play uses sexuality, deception and distrust to keep us questioning exactly who has control. Donze’s Meda also feels like the sort of role Jennifer Tilly or Daryl Hannah might have played in that era: enigmatic, seductive and just dangerous enough that you’re never quite sure whether to trust her. Akaina Ghosh gives Eve a compelling counterpoint as her professional certainty gradually starts to unravel. The script is very talky and dense, but beneath all those conversations is an intriguing exploration of who gets to decide what is real, who gets to judge others and what loyalty actually means when everyone has something to hide.

There’s something fitting about encountering a play like this at the Fringe. These are the kinds of strange, sexy, genre-bending stories that once had a natural home in independent cinema, finding audiences through Sundance, word of mouth and eventually the DVD shelf. As Matt Damon has pointed out when talking about Hollywood’s old DVD economy, that market gave studios a reason to take risks on films that might not make their money back at the box office. With that world largely gone, stories like The Misfortunes of a Spy and Her Mystic feel increasingly like throwbacks. Perhaps the Fringe has become one of the places where that kind of adventurous independent storytelling can still find its audience.

Lee Hutchison

Runs until August 29th at Greenside George St.