Affection had its world première at Screamfest, 7th Oct 2025
Affection opens in medias res, with a car parked in the middle of a lonely road at night, in the middle of nowhere. A woman lying unconscious face down on the tarmac besides it gasps and coughs, and gets up, her ankle twisted and dragging behind her. She gets a tremour in her hand and suffers a seizure, but then starts limping along again, until a second car appears, chasing the terrified woman down and ramming right into her from behind. This is such an arresting prologue, full of violence yet lacking all context – and before we have a chance to catch our breath, that same woman gasps awake again, only this time in bed and apparently uninjured, yet as confused as we are.
This is Ellie (Jessica Rothe), wife of Bruce (Joseph Cross) and mother to little Alice (Julianne Layne) – except Ellie herself does not think so. For she does not recognise either her husband or daughter, and is horrified to wake up besides someone she regards as a complete stranger. She remembers being called Sarah, having a son and a different husband, even a different face, while photos all over the house suggest that she has been with Bruce for a long time. Bespectacled, floppy haired Bruce patiently explains that an accident has left her with a rare neurological condition, where she forgets her real memories, while experiencing elaborate false memories as her own, “just like when you dream.”
Ellie tries to reacquaint herself with Bruce and Alice on their remote farm, and to regain her memories. Meanwhile Alice has nightmares about a monster in her bedroom who “looked like me, but it wasn’t me”, and seems herself to remember as still alive a grandfather who is long dead. Later, playing in the nearby woods with Alice, Ellie sees – or half-sees – a monstrous female figure crawling under a sheet of plastic, and finds Bruce unable or unwilling to believe her. Ellie too is not sure what to believe and doubts everything, yet for all her helplessness and dependence on Bruce, she wonders if she might be being gaslit – and we are right there with her in this suspicion.
Affection certainly starts as a paranoid amnesia thriller, not unlike Rowan Joffe’s Before I Go To Sleep (2014) – but then first-time writer/director BT Meza introduces some wild curveballs, including hybridised narrative elements from the Frankenstein and Bodysnatchers myths, and from Duncan Jones’ Moon (2009) and Will Howarth and Tom McKeith’s In Vitro (2024). Yet despite allowing these horror and sci-fi tropes to encroach upon the home, the film always remains rooted in family, and switches perspectives between its three characters so that we can understand – even sympathise with – all their actions and motivations, no matter how horrific the ramifying consequences.
At the heart of Affection is a tragedy about loss, as both Ellie and Bruce struggle vainly to rebuild what is long gone: Ellie to retrace her fractured, crashing identity; and Bruce to restore his loved ones to what they once were. In these quixotic quests to reconstitute an elusive, idealised history of domestic bliss, people do terrible things, problems multiply, miracles always seem to come too late, and those who strive to move on into a new future prove better off than those stuck chasing the tail of an ever-receding past.
strap: BT Meza’s genre-fied domestic tragedy places an amnesiac woman in a family home that she does not recognise where problems compound and multiply
© Anton Bitel
