Unravelling had its London première at FrightFest 2024, 26 Aug
Unravelling opens with an aerial, high-angle zoom into the dark space between tall forest trees, and then grounded if disorienting POV shots of someone running through them. In keeping with this fairytale setting, Aimie Willemse’s short film concerns a granddaughter who, like Little Red Riding Hood, is visiting the woodland cottage of her grandmother. Young adult Fiona (Shona McHugh; also played by contortionist Minnie Knot) is with her nan Maeve (Sheila Grier), and as they sort through Maeve’s old family photos and jewellery together, ‘downsizing’ for an end that both know is coming, issues of tradition and inheritance are foregrounded.
“This used to be my favourite,” says Maeve of a silver bracelet, “My mother gave it to me when I was a young woman. Belonged to my grandmother. I think you should have it.” Here she is handing not just an heirloom, but a legacy of a different kind, down the female line. For not only is Maeve, who suffers from all kinds of pains and ailments, unable to close the clasp around Fiona’s wrist, but so too is Fiona, who drops the bracelet while trying to put it on. “It’ll pass,” Maeve says, wincing and clutching her chest, “it always passes”, even as Fiona, seeing thorny branches protrude from her grandmother’s back, flees in horror and confusion into the woods. Indeed it does pass, at least in a different sense, as now Fiona too is painfully crippled and contorted by the woody spikes which emerge from her own flesh.
As unnerving and irrational as it is beautiful, Unravelling shows a young woman assuming her birthright and taking on the painful burden of her own genetic endowment. Thematically it makes an excellent companion piece to Natalie Erika James’ Relic (2020), which similarly uses body horror motifs to trace deterioration and decline across a family’s female generations – but it is also deeply informed by Willemse’s own personal biography. For the genesis of the project was the multiple sclerosis with which the writer/director has been recently diagnosed, and which also affected her (now late) uncle. Accordingly this is an allegorical fantasy in which Fiona is not just getting momentarily lost in the woods, but accepting the inherited disease, as well as the support and solidarity, of her family tree.
strap: In Aimie Willemse’s short film, a young woman’s assumption of genetic disease is allegorised as fairytale body horror
© Anton Bitel
