(Written by Intern, Alecia Wilk)
Making an almost overwhelming aesthetic impression, the look and feel of Sew Torn is Tumblr’s take on retro. With delicate hands clad in pastel yellow fingerless gloves, a mousy-haired and wide-eyed main character drives her buggy across cobblestone to her eccentric job as a mobile seamstress. Things could not be quirkier. Still, there is more than eye candy to be dazzled by; the distinctive visuals exemplify the intricate manner of director Freddy Macdonald’s moviemaking. His ability to tell such an original and heartily amusing tale speaks to his promise.
To be expected from its punny title, Sew Torn’s opening feels distinctly like a young adult novel. At the same time, it contradicts that market early on with a shot of a woman peeing and a continual descent into graphic violence. The opening scene is quickly distinguished by set and props. A colored string contraption unlike anything else spans Barbara’s (Eve Connolly) bedroom ceiling. She is a protagonist of Taylor Swift lyrics spun to life: waify, altruistic, and mistreated with a spark of vengeance. She portrays a meek mastermind. All throughout her antics—Barbara hardly takes to spoken word—she expresses herself mostly by panting as she anxiously architects her thread traps. This is not to say she is helpless; she captures and bounds more than one grown man, and the story is structured around her decisions. She is quite literally pulling the strings, and the plot progression is downright compelling by her hand. However, this choice does lead to her character being outshined by the villanous Hudson Armitage (John Lynch). So good at being bad, he is menacing both subtly and in extremes. Lynch gets the best lines, and his vocal control and acting choices bring a scene-elevating heat to those sequences.
This is not to say Macdonald shows carelessness in fleshing Barbara out. He is simply more interested in constructing a story wherein depth is concentrated in orchestration. Sew Torn’s structure alone makes for a riveting watch. Tracing over the scene of a crime and Barbara’s responses in Groundhog Day style, the event lives out three alternate realities as Barbara repeats “choices”. It helps that the inter-chapter theme is so visually and sonically pleasing. The journey compounds to an interesting, and gently handled allusion to the processing of loss. In every interaction of the accident’s fallout, Barbara’s central conflict revolves around taking control. She wonders over and over how to do things just right so they work in her favor. Each attempt is doomed—simply taking a different path toward the same ill fate. The answer lies in her surrender to the events and the bittersweet realization that outcomes cannot always be bent by will.
The combination of kitschy, twee visual cues and tropes with an arc marked by merciless violence makes a target audience hard to place. Though, maybe, this is the collateral for a script so original. With Sew Torn, Freddy Macdonald invents a refreshingly off-beat story, where criminal fantasies somehow stitch together a hard truth about acceptance.
See what a comedy thriller has to say about the ties that bind us when Sew Torn hits theatres on Friday, May 9th.
