Fissure

Assuming the 12-minute short Fissure is intended as a proof of concept, then it’s an interesting one. The opening scene shows a fleeting distorted memory in which a child disappears during the handful of seconds her parents look away. When the child’s mother, Kate (Emma Laidlaw), wakes from her nightmare, a white board behind her bed gives a running count of the number of ‘Days Without Incident’. Kate is seriously ill at ease in the real world, and the peculiar distortions from her dreams appear to be seeping into her waking life. During the scenes that follow it briefly looks like Fissure will tell its story almost entirely without dialogue, but a little before the halfway mark Kate begins to speak, and that’s when the endeavour becomes more aggravating than compelling.

For a small budget short, the directing and editing (by Paul Wright) is a cut above, but the film suffers from a script (Paul Wright again) that aims for enigmatic but misses by some margin. When using drugs, Kate sees her child again and is sure that she’s alive in a hinterland beyond our senses. What follows throws up far too many questions for a film with such a short running time, and the overriding impression is that the film is no more au fait with the answers than we are. Here are just a few of the bothersome questions it isn’t interested in answering: What is the hinterland? How did Kate’s daughter get there without taking any drugs? Who else lives there? How is she not dead from starvation? Why doesn’t Kate’s ex think his daughter is alive when all she’s done is disappear? And most importantly, why should we care?

That Laidlaw never truly disappears into the role of Kate doesn’t help matters. When faced with longer takes, the discomfort of her character seems to speak more to Laidlaw’s own discomfort as an actress.

If this is just a tease for a future longer project, then it does have some promise. But if this is a fait accompli, and there are no answers coming, then what we have here is Lost on a smaller scale: some interesting ideas, a solid execution, but no real idea just what is making everything tick.



It’s been quite awhile since I’ve updated the blog, so I have an overwhelming need to give a round-up of my top 10 films of 2017 (so far). (Just as so very many other blogs and websites have done.) It's been a pretty awesome year so far:

1. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)

2. The Handmaiden (Chan-wook Park)

3. Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan)

4. La La Land (Damien Chazelle)

5. Lion (Garth Davis)

6. Baby Driver (Edgar Wright)

7. Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi)

8. Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd)

9. Get Out (Jordan Peele)

10. 20th Century Women (Mike Mills)