Sew Torn had its UK première at the Glasgow Film Festival, 27 Feb 2025
Freddy MacDonald’s Sew Torn begins with red thread on green grass, like a trail of blood, and then the corpse of a young woman. This is Barbara Duggen (Eve Connolly), a seamstress like her late mother, who has somehow got entangled in a scenario that leads inexorably to her death. In fact the film begins with not just this one, but three tableaux of Barbara lying on the ground either dead or near death – like the three threads, red, yellow and blue, that are used to embroider the film’s stylised opening title. For like her shop going out of business with its sign “Everything must go”, it seems that Barbara shares with all of us an inherent mortality, and that no matter what she does or what decisions she makes, her fate is already sealed.
“Choices, choices, choices,” Barbara says in voiceover of the three separate decisions that have all driven her to a similar destiny – and then she repeats three times, like a mantra or magical spell, the three options available to her when she chances upon two armed criminals crashed and injured in the road, and a case full of hard cash just beyond their reach: “Perfect crime, call police, drive away.” That is essentially the structure of the film, which like Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998), sees how a spur-of-the-moment decision branches in three radically different, although interwoven, directions, and expressly asks its viewers to reach a judgement as to which, if any, is best or at least right. In all three, Barbara must work out what to do with experienced dealer Beck (Thomas Douglas), the younger, more conflicted Joshua (Calum Worthy) who, like Barbara, is heir to the family business, and Joshua’s ruthless career criminal of a father Hudson (John Lynch). Meanwhile she repeatedly crosses paths with imperious Grace Vessler (Caroline Goodall) who wants the final button sewn on her wedding dress, with sweet-natured Oskar (Ron Cook) who is learning to embroider a “talking portrait” for his wife, and with local police officer/wedding celebrant/notary Ms Engel (K Callan).
Despite its multiple narrative strands with their fatal trajectories, and its preoccupation with such weighty themes as nature and nurture, free will and determinism, Sew Torn is a spry, sly film full of Coën-esque eccentrics and stylised whimsy, not least of which is the overt artifice of having a cast all speak English (with a wide range of accents) despite an explicit setting in the Swiss Alps. Cinematographer Sebastian Klinger and production designer Viviane Rapp lend everything a picture-postcard hyperreality reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001) or Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), while Jacob Tardien’s score of strings and musical saws brings just the right tone of fey lightness.
The emphasis on Barbara’s profession as a seamstress is not just an allusion to the three Moirae of Greek mythology who spin the death-destined fates of all humans, but also cross-stitches its way through the very fabric of the film. For Barbara lives upstairs from the shop in an apartment that she has decorated with a spider’s web-like network of multi-coloured yarns, and she repeatedly deploys absurdly elaborate thread-operated devices in her various attempts to evade what is coming. Of course, it is really writer/director/editor MacDonald who is pulling all the strings, expanding on his 2019 proof-of-concept short of the same name – and in a clever coda, he shows how the the film’s real button-pushing moral crux in fact came before Barbara hit the road, as though to suggest that even our smallest actions can have ramifying consequences with foreseen, if not quite foregone conclusions. Perhaps, in keeping with the comically surreal approach of Sew Torn to its materials, everything turns out alright in the end – but then, it depends on which end you choose to focus, and what you imagine lies around the next corner. Life, after all, always hangs by a thread.
strap: Freddy MacDonald’s tripartite yarn shows a young seamstress struggling to survive three parallel narrative threads
© Anton Bitel
