The quirks of slightly fantastical black-comedy crime thriller Sew Torn are many and varied… and also messily disjointed.
Small-business owner Barbara (Eve Connolly) could have stepped out of an early Wes Anderson lark, with her little sewing shop that specializes in “talking portraits” — pull a string on the needlepoint likenesses and a recorded voice speaks — and her “mobile seamstress” service, based out of her retro jitterbug of a car complete with giant spool of thread on the boot.
Her small Swiss Alps village (where, strangely, almost everyone speaks American-accented English) is more Coen Brothers, though, with the local authority, elderly Ms Engel (K Callan: Knives Out, Nine Lives), serving as police, notary public, and wedding officiant all in one. Coen-esque, too, is the unlikely scene Barbara stumbles across one day on a lonely mountain road: a drug deal seemingly gone bad, with two motorcyclists (Calum Worthy [Corporate Animals, The Big Year] and Thomas Douglas) sprawled across the pavement, injured but each trying to be the first to drag himself to a scattered gun and the suitcase that Barbara will soon discover is crammed with cash.
Where Barbara’s odyssey goes from here is a touch Run Lola Run, a hint of Sliding Doors, and a whole lot of those kids’ Choose Your Own Adventure game books that were so popular in the 1980s and 90s. She decides she has one of three choices to make: commit the perfect crime (that is, take the suitcase full of money and run), call the police, or simply drive away. She will eventually do all three, with each scenario playing out rather disastrously until the universe rewinds and tries again.
Writer-director Freddy Macdonald — making his feature debut with an expansion of his own 2019 short of the same name — never quite manages to reconcile his strange brew of diverse influences into a cohesive whole, which leaves this little movie feeling somewhat underdone. But there’s a delicious oddness to the original spins Macdonald puts on the familiar tropes he borrows, and how he mines unpredictability from it all, particularly in the long, dialogue-free sequences in which Barbara constructs peculiar little Rube Goldberg contraptions of needle and thread. (The Claire Danes–ish Connolly is a treat, too, as a woman nowhere near a criminal mastermind, just a desperate eccentric — she’s on the verge of bankruptcy and will have to close the shop, so that suitcase of cash would really help.)
Though it offers tastes of both, Sew Torn is neither weird enough nor violent enough to truly satisfy on either count. But Macdonald, a Student Academy Award winner, is clearly a filmmaker to watch.
more films like this:
• Run Lola Run [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | BFI Player UK]
• Full Time [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Mubi US | Curzon Home Cinema UK]
