I once covered the first day of the first class of a brand new film school. Directing students were learning how to rehearse a scene with actors, and one of them finished his turn running the set when he asked the actors to switch roles — gender, age, plot and logic be damned — for another go.
The professor interrupted him and made a teachable moment out of this whim. At best, what the kid was trying was a gimmick. At worst, he would be wasting expensive production time on set for a movie that investors paid to turn out a ceratin way, in a way that amounts to a childish, unprofessional indulgence.
How you respond to the comic indie thriller “Sew Torn” depends on your tolerance for such gimmicks, and for pun titles.
First time feature director Freddy Macdonald, remaking a proof-of-conceit short film, hammers the viewer over the head with the parable he’s setting up, the “choices” our heroine/antu-heroine Barbara (Eve Connolly) makes which lead to four different outcomes spinning out of her moment of truth.
Is there a “right” and “moral” choice that will give her a happily ever after? Or will she have to break the rules, the law and rob and escape mobsters to commit “the perfect crime” to get there?
Barbara is a small town “mobile seamstress,” daughter of the seamstress who opened Duggen’s sewing shop and seamstress service. Haunted by her dead mother, whose own gimmick was a sort of forget-me-not machine-copied-from-a-photo embroidery pillow with a voice chip containing a loved one’s message, best wishes, etc.,
Barbara is trapped in her dead mother’s failing business dealing with a handful of eccentric to downright rude clients.
But one day, she skips out on a rude bride (Caroline Goodall) who is furious over a button on her “everything’s got to be PERFECT” wedding dress and stumbles across an accident/crime scene.
There are entangled, burning motorcycles, two battered and bloodied drivers crawling along the pavement, a couple of pistols in plain sight with busted bags of white power over the remote stretch of mountain road (This was filmed in Switzerland’s Tamina Valley). One rider has the busted half of a handcuff on one arm. The other handcuff half is on a briefcase.
We’ve seen a few movies and a lot of TV. We know the whole story without anybody telling us. Barbara’s stumbled into a “drop” gone wrong.
“Perfect crime,” Barbara narrates in her mind from the seat of her kitschy late model Fiat 500 with a giant needle and thread on the back. “Call police. Drive away.”
The “crime” part is driving away with that briefcase. We then see four different iterations of Barbara’s “choices” that have her trying to get paid and get out of the trap of her life with her wits and her three dimensional seamtress’s view of the world.
We watch her try to DIY her way out of jams — attempting to turn the tables on being held at gunpoint, weaving a web of thread that will give the two bad guys (Calum Worthy and Thomas Douglas) string-manipulated access to their pistols at the same time, setting snares and booby-traps, tying down her own hostage. using a needle and thread as a form of grappling hook, the works.
If it can be done with a thimble, thread, needle and tiny scissors, Barbara’s whe whiz who can manage it.
John Lynch plays the not-to-be-trifled-with — “He’s coming for me, then he’s coming for you” mobster. He will be her ultimate foil in these thought exercises in getting away with drug money.
Yes, it plays like a piece of theater workshopped into various finales. `And no, you never forget that what you’re watching is gimmicky. But so what? So is every “Knives Out” mystery.
It’s the script’s notion of problem-solving-by-sewing that sells this. That’s downright ingenious.
How will Barbara sew or thread her out of each jam is a fun way to conjure up suspense in a film that doesn’t have a lot of urgency, thanks to its rural setting.
We see the colorful currency, hear everybody speaking English and yet notice the (Swiss) mountains and architecture and ponder the curious and curious cliched characters and try to place this story in a logical place, and can’t.
Wherever this is, the great Northern Irish character actor Lynch (“The Secret Garden,” “In the Name of the Father”) seems both right at home and a scary aberration in a quaint, Swiss Miss TV commercial setting.
“Choices choices choices,” Barbara narrates. How will this gimmick pay off, and does it matter than she says “choices” three times in a movie where plainly a fourth option can be trotted out?
Who cares? It’s fun, and no matter how contrived, Macdonald and Connolly — of TV’s “Into the Badlands” and “Vikings” — keeps us engaged in a “Mouse Hunt” tale where the trick is to have the right thread and get it through the eye of the needle enough times to pay off.
Rating: unrated, bloody violence, profanity
Cast: Eve Connolly, Calum Worthy, Thomas Douglas, K Callan, Caroline Goodall and John Lynch.
Credits: Directed by Freddy Macdonald, scripted by Fred Macdonald and Freddy Macdonald. A Vertigo Release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:40
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